City Summer

I could hear silence now,

or snow, falling,
that the ear echoes
and forgets

If silence pricked this restlessness,
this drone, suddenly,
a star to the heat -

silence under the ice
and in the long arches of snowdrifts -

breaking
the exigence to and fro,
swelter, and the street-mouthed echo,

I could hear it
tighten
like a tree to the rime,
or a bird's wing
that splinters the frost

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