February forbids recovery.
Each day pushes farther
from a reliable dawn, a measured
evening. Days lengthen
according to the sun and eye,
the mind, the muscled flutter
of a body’s precarious valves.
A heart is an emblem not of love
but of survival, of what holds.
Tread the pale memory of grass,
or watch the dun shadows of woods
sketch dislocation in hatched lines.
The entire horizon moves
like the hide-and-bones deer,
hungry and venturing, a hundred feet above
a river and the trains bellowing beside it,
the run of black water, gray ice bobbing
like wreckage. The clouds harbor
the little light, out of the reach
of the weary acolytes of ice.
Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and works as a vice president for marketing and communications at Duquesne University.
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