Chris Hutchinson - not quite winter

November. The sky is missing:
a stolen monument, a breach. Still,
a few starlings litter the horizon: distant
flickerings, variegated shades of ash. Meanwhile,

a cross-hatched scrim or
a tangled mess of wind-
nodding tree limbs complicates
optimism. Knowing

the season, the attic chatters, a home
to scurrilous squirrels, mischief’s minions,
inclined to strident and obnoxious idioms.
Knowing as little or

as much, I mutter myself, pace the unvarnished
floorboards in circular logic, consider what
and what’s not meant to be.
Awake or asleep

I am a slave to my circadian rhythms,
just as the sun like a golden coin or
a nameless smear ascends or descends on time.
Now is the season, the hour

well into the festival of what is not eternal,
and always the theme of poetry
as involution and/or the winter blahs.
Now comes the too sudden

darkness and the skinless moon:
a lidless eye or maybe it’s just God’s
bare light bulb dangling from oblivion.
Yes, in such light

I’ll compose my book
of winter, let pages flutter
to the floor, accumulate one by one
like flakes of snow, senseless, cold,

full of essence.