warmth in pre-winter

Winter Sun
by Molly Fisk

How valuable it is in these short days,
threading through empty maple branches,
the lacy-needled sugar pines.

Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story
of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold.

We can make do with so little, just the hint
of warmth, the slanted light.

The way we stand there, soaking in it,
mittened fingers reaching.

And how carefully we gather what we can
to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.

snow...

SNOW: I

by C.K. Williams

All night, snow, then, near dawn, freezing rain, so that by morning the whole city glistens
in a glaze of high-pitched, meticulously polished brilliance, everything rounded off,
the cars submerged nearly to their windows in the unbroken drifts lining the narrow alleys,
the buildings rising from the trunklike integuments the wind has molded against them.
Underlit clouds, blurred, violet bars, the rearguard of the storm, still hang in the east,
immobile over the flat river basin of the Delaware; beyond them, nothing, the washed sky,
one vivid wisp of pale smoke rising waveringly but emphatically into the brilliant ether.
No one is out yet but Catherine, who closes the door behind her and starts up the street.