If ice is dead sky
as four year old Arlo suggests,
and it’s true that
poetry’s value is in its total uselessness,

and if, as the maintenance guy muttered
when called in during a blizzard (verbatim),
the logic of my essential status still escapes me,
(snow continuing, verbatim, in Massachusetts),

and if as Allen wrote
Everything that falls breaks into endless tiny
moments, each one large, a style of its own

then our moon tonight is a grand piano,
its strings plucked by wind, spilling waves of icy chords, driving
wood frogs to freeze themselves to life.

This world may appear overly accessible
but leopards (a handful now) wait in the bush.

All along we pray chronology
keep to a slow & steady beat—
father and mother first,
then older sister, kid brother last.

If one miracle grants beatitude
and it’s necessary to perform two to clinch sainthood,
then how easy to accept that 12.5 billion light years
from spinning earth pulses a proto-cluster, a billion years old.

Who remembers that the “head of all Turkmen”
banned lip-synching in Turkmenistan,
changed the months of the year
to honor his own name,
and who can forget the Mainland
forbidding reincarnation without authorization?

Over half this accessible planet
is still ruled by mandarins, martinets, madmen.
Listen, Arlo:
if in fact language presupposes artificiality
and it’s only black holes keeping us adhered
then I believe ice is dead sky.
I believe in the posthumous pussy willows
alive in the dry vase.