The newly-fallen snow lights up the night.
We are beholden in the field of the poem.
When the planes lean down into their lights to land, we still ourselves in sink holes from long-ago buried tree trunks.
No one really remembers.
How the plow truck almost found us walking at the edge of the front yard.
How one sable, velvet glove waved to the confused old man from the frozen stream.
Or that there are plastic coffins amassed at the left corner of night in case the plane loses its passengers en route home.
But it’s very late now.
The stars are hidden behind a gauze of cloud-blanket not fog.
One street lamp blinks in and out, a misplaced lighthouse overlooking ice-encrusted tar.
A lazy eye wandering the neighborhood looking for coyotes.
When the missing glove is realized, one is already preoccupied with paying for this month’s electricity, this winter’s heating oil—while lining the pills up on the counter for tomorrow.
Everything hurt all at once, but the dream would come and rescue the old woman from her body.
The dream would set the table for a conversation with our ghosts.