The fenders of old Fords glitter

in songs of frost, winter stones,

the green curves of your eyes sharp

against the snow, the purple

of an iron twilight silhouette, the red of your fire

flayed out, your silent hair

like prayers leaping

from electric fingers over tombs.

babe, you so tense, sshhh—

don’t speak while

winter’s throwing her pale stars,

stirring like translucent freckles peering upward,

whispering beneath milky brows

and tiring of the band inside won’t they just

sshhh—I hear your collar rasping against your skin,

the blood in your lips pressing

in fragile vacillations, susurrant battalions

teeming for

Me I clamor to say.

The rigid burn of the lights behind sullies up

and hurries up and stammers against the windows

with moist fingertips, the guitar

and the bass juggling each against other—ssssshhh what

are they saying meaning longing.

The fenders of old Fords gleam

like the precise shudders of cold hawks

cocked on sick white birches,

shifting and exhaling,

their coiled breaths gnarling away into

twilight. Time well bandied.

Speak why do you never

speak

they gander into a song I think I know,

strong and slow.

The young girls sigh out the wintered windows

and draw spirals in the fogged glass.

Twilight ails, founders in the drifts and banks

bundled on the hills, smooth as women’s bellies.

Speak I’ll never speak, not to auger

this low immutable air.

You in a crimson coat like a tulip dead in snow.

The drummer downs his chaser and

those cymbals spray against the sills, grabbing for evening

like rouged eyelids, cupping instead the shoulders of young girls

and drawing their heels to the floor.

Your twilight’s gone glassy with moon,

suddenly glistening in a lucid luminous charge

across the stalky land, pallid as silvered opals

flinging the scent of cold sap

against me, standing

like a battered cellist, empty,

a voiceless warden.

Will you never Speak

speak?

the singer, blanched, lilts

across the acres of thinly clothed flesh,

leans the girls back against frigid walls.

The fenders of old Fords harden and grow white,

burgeoning in cracked mutters of old metal.

My heart turns in a sallow faded land,

and I gather myself under that piano-painted moon,

because I cannot gather you.