A woman wanders through the house, stacking dishes neatly on their shelves, folding T-shirts into perfect white squares. Outside, in the yard, he moves like breath in the cool air.
Birds babble in the trees.
A limb snaps like the click of a lock. Ice crunches beneath his boot. He watches the cracked sky shimmy in the river's icy windowpane as sunlight pries through a cloud. How long, he wonders, before leaves mumble through the trees and pansies burst from their purple straightjackets. Does the description in the poem successfully reveal the poem's dramatic situation.