from A Mass for the Snow inside the Dead

3.
We were brightly disturbed in the snow, she & I,
in the snow that hung there between our respective windows.
I stood there after a bath, naked, except for a towel, shivering.
Watching the one who liked to watch,
from the apartment across the courtyard.
We passed across the window simultaneously, she & I,
Playing that game, that is to say, the living, paused by the window,
floating there light as snow, but so heavy. After all,
the two of us had been evicted from our bodies,
through many abandoned bodies that after all, give light, I suppose.
She stood in her light & I stood in mine, two strangers with eyes,
drifting in & out of the white hair as we floated inside of her watching.
She leaned to the windowsill
so that the front of her nightgown hung down, spilled open.
Then she pulled it over her torso so that her black hair
kind of poured down into the currents of light
with the logic & movement of water in all of that ice.
&  I lost my towel, then stood there.
The lost fell in the space between us in those long moments
like locust flowers in Spring,
like those little feathered spores that infest the air of St. Petersburg,
each March, carried on little air currents, pausing in the hair of women ―
only frozen in liquid oxygen & pulverized
into a sudden white patch, I mean pure sheets down below,
a desert, completely impassable,
for the air had come between us.
& I fell off my horse.
The air suddenly laid naked to this warm rush, bare,
thousands of seas coming into their own liquids,
suddenly lain down into thousands of muted shells
revealing their pink warmth through me,
& all the churchbells began to ring at once.

6.
All the mirrors are filled with snowfall.
All the television screens in this sleeping region are full of static, rooms of it,
& these beings contain me full of faces falling in the snow, the lacemakers, the widow-makers,
faces that have been carried through their emptiness to impregnate me.
& all day on the radio, the voices have been reading Osip’s poems.

(Those voices were whispering me into thousands of frozen wings, tiny ones, toward that place
at the window where I’m still asleep, standing there inside my body, inside this bright page of
light suspended in the blizzard, on which they’ve printed his name)

& the two stood over him, in the cabin:
snowfall, softly, unrecognizably, & when he asked your name,
you answered through me with his voice:
“I―I don’t remember; but I remember that when I was little, they called me Osia.”
Ocea―little one, softly impregnated absence, Osip, pawprint in the snow:

(& the Dead, atomizing this discharge of the union between us, into the snow, into the light, we
are the snowchildren thereof, children of the Dead, waiting to be)

in the shape of your murdered absence, Osip,
in the shape of the presence of your hunger,
in the one who spoke those words as he lay there shivering,
up North.
& outside the cabin, of course, the snow continued to fall.
And, when those two peasants bent down to ask his name, & he died,
all of Saint Petersburg became a City of the Dead then,
as if we had buried the sun there,
whose voices, all day long, on the radio, had been reading his poems.

(Now They were delivering haloes of blue flame through the sound of a great wind, white bird
of dry particles set immediately on fire & released to disappear into a plume of powdered snow
sucked through the crack between the window & the frame, like dry-ice smoke into my quiet
kitchen, saying.)

In the snow, We are all children, even the Dead.
Therefore, the mouths of the Dead are open,
necks craned back to catch a few snowflakes on their tongues.

(Inside the Dead, we are children, we are all of us snow, disappeared onto their nothing-tongues,
showing through as particles of frozen fire here: illuminated doorflame: body standing in the
doorway; snuffed candle of my burning tongue: a boiled egg quartered on the plate: blue, cyrillic
letters having seeped into the eggwhite: cyrillic blue zero of a flame ringing the burners of my gas
stove)

& the snow filled up my footsteps behind me
as I walked the streets for hours before.
Walked through the necropolis of these rooms filling the air,
a species of absence filling each footstep with powdered milk.

(I laid them down like pages, outside, inside the falling snow, through these courtyards, by the
church, with its belltower missing a bell, under guywires, screaming in the wind, & in alleys, I left
footsteps for the Strange Ones to fill with a body: discovered a new set & followed them, &
when a living one passed me without speaking, I responded with what the snow offers, according
to the mood & injury of each second―)

Sam Witt has published two books of poetry, the first of which, Everlasting Quail, won the 2000 Katherine Nason Bakeless Poetry Prize from Breadloaf; the second, Sunflower Brother, was published by Cleveland State University Press in 2006. His work has been published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Harvard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fence, and Epoch.  In addition, his work has been published in several anthologies, including The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (edited by Reginald Shepherd), and The New Young American Poets (edited by Kevin Prufer).

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