The snow calls in desperate rhythms,
--a death, a death! Sounding
as it fell, a harrowed breath.

I made a home, quietly burying my hands
in the shallow of your sleep,
to hush this scratching of winter -
in this place I lay my whispers over your vault
where each secret becomes a sinking stone:
a litany bound and honed in a paralysis of ice.
And from where you lie, looking up, up, up,
you numbingly hollow the cave.

The frantic of my hands digs beneath the cold,
-- release, release! Pounding,
leaving my fingertips in the icehouse of your bone.

But to my desires the grave will never answer,
instead it coves the submersion of my depths
to your heavy winter coat;
In Death there is no separation,
only its stifled lament.

I remember -
we used to fall vows from our mouths
like the passing of morning beneath our sheets,
and the flex of your swallow, ripe in fluidity--
all these things are now dead to me;
for Dying comes and takes us both away.

As you go your footsteps scar the exits,
leaving me a chattel to the snow.


**This is a collaborative poem between myself and April Michelle Bratten**

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