The sustained can't hold us. The winter the snow wouldn't stop falling the world was reduced to repetition until spring thaw muted it to ice cold warming lakes. Wild sheep drank there. All this marble determination to house drawers of ash, a room encrypted with light. All this ritual alteration of landmarks, poinsettias racked on each grave, and none the answer to how ward off the night.
Vines compete for the marrow of trees winter-thin to make room for the lesser light.
Climbing the hill to the founders' crypt, tiers of the exemplary sound the world to progress through a regimen of flowers, of marking stages of grief as if the night weren't posed as a range of questions, some so dark there's no priority to the prior, nothing to remember but the present as a gift of cool vague absence, a thin place, a moment's narrow cave between pulse beats of blinking color downtown, a code flashing to the nightsky again and again a single letter, an afterimage invisible by dawn.