A heavy snow is falling on a copse of trees—
in an otherwise barren landscape—and it weighs

less than time, the earth’s hush sounding off
on the silence, the whiteout a measure of erasure 

and not, an iron plaque on the entrance gates
the narrative, a historian’s words clinging 

and clanging in the wind, mad sweeping gusts 
thickening and thinning, the globe that is 

the mind shaken—a footless leg a severed head, 
the fury of the heavens stirring the naked limbs 

of winter, rattling the bones of consciousness, 
the human visitation the beast the savage, corpses 

fleshed to life by a tourist with a camera, lens 
darkened by the aperture of the sky, a solitary 

figure sinking into the accumulation, edging 
closer to the ground, an angle on weariness now 

observed by the caretaker wrestling snow from
the curated abstract, a few lines here a few words 

there, the villains the victims, the year the month 
the dead, the tourist in red outerwear himself 

a letter c—cut in half, an ink smudge fading, a dot 
in the eye of the beholder, a veil of snow from 

swallowing a body whole, the besieged caretaker 
trudging his way back to desk and chair, to tower 

restored to original grandeur, pen lodged in the spine 
of his ledger marking the day’s comers and goers.