A wintering;
and everything we know
is hearsay: ravens
picking at a blood-knot in the snow, the village
lost, two miles away, the roads
impassable.
All summer,
there were others in the house
disguised as children, charmless, ravening,
but clothed, as children are,
in swansdown, proofed
like saints against the day
of judgment, when the livestock in the barn
grow weary of themselves, their textbook forms
reduced to hoof and bone, their dreams of light
discarded for the banquetry of slops
on which we feed,
though no one here is lean.
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