OVER-WINTERING

 
Visible. The fog is rolling in.
The wide, lonely skies of dawn are drenched in milky masses, like feathers on a feather.
Black, bone-handled daggers stand like daggers in the shivering trees before advent.
On the throats of the mountains, like so many melted
swan-white snow-white snowflakes
The desolate frost, chilling, strange drizzle.

Love-flame burnt in bleeding rays, happiness weeps and trembles.
With frozen wings the living still struggles, hopelessly wavering.
- Out there the angel-scented snow turns to dirt.
The solemn, noble silence is broken by the ominous exegesis of the envious.
The twilight, fearful, waves no more to the landscape.

Once more a sickly wreck, down below, who wishes to live and limps on.
For he is grown great again, and the world's care is his own.
They tear and tear at each other, the howling marchers
and vulture-like they strangle the less fortunate
If they have not a career or material security.

Their unhappy burdens are heavy, sad old-man-trees
All nodding and wavering under their heavy burdens;
They shackle them like shackles,
In their skeleton arms the frozen balls of winter.
- I would stretch out my arm to fortune, if there were any.
I'd reach out to the dunna of lamb's-wool clouds,
To feel the weight of her tiny,
of peppering sniffs, of soft squeaks.

Now the world is all envious words and pretty window-panes.
A restrained exaggeration of mood,
and all the jealous little canaries of each other
kicks off their ornamental plumage of jewels.
- What foreign substance has love become?
From hangman's ropes, perhaps, of insidious interests
Were woven into its massive membranous fabric?!
- Among the fire-hiding stars, snow-tailed meteors secretly tell...