City Summer
I could hear silence now,
or snow, falling,
that the ear echoes
and forgets
If silence pricked this restlessness,
this drone, suddenly,
a star to the heat -
silence under the ice
and in the long arches of snowdrifts -
breaking
the exigence to and fro,
swelter, and the street-mouthed echo,
I could hear it
tighten
like a tree to the rime,
or a bird's wing
that splinters the frost