Uncertainly Placed

This land is played out on a plain bible. Nightlights smear a frigid fog, the fumes of idling cars. A flat-lined wind plies its wheezy bellows through burrowing bones, smothers the distance, douses the glint of rural glimmers. Knuckled chills know how to fang a wrist, nip tender tongues, freeze the rivers run. Here in the burbs the lights of bistros cannot withstand their own desolate backyards. A scree heap of black curb is not crossed by the lightly shod but must be booted-in and leveled. At such times, winter lends a shivering hand at its own burial. We become priests all frocked in fleece, heads bowed or we howl a tune to a faceless moon. Good or gone to the bad, we are there, in Ohio, anywhere.