Fugue in Winter These days colours are muted but everything speaks to me sons and daughters grown gentle with each other in ritual reunions pigeons that purr on the balcony like itinerant cats making the circuit everything speaks to me, winter relents grown sons and daughters gentle with each other a white complexion of mind glow of shorn boughs in moonlight winter relents everything speaks long limbs of pearled boughs and bushes generations of roses in this wrinkled berry the colour of their voices gentle. Slide The image clings to painted plaster walls reprised and magnified 35 mm laughs and poses larger than life lean on the veranda in casual immortality a hale and profane grand-dad wipes the mouth organ a young flirtatious woman looks back over her shoulder— a galaxy of light sheddings, inconstant scatterings of children in neat shorts where’s the grammar for this — this was you, wasn’t it still and dark when the imaging light goes out sliding back into your spine, your blood, always the same age they ever you ever were Yellow calls us to the things of the world Lemon slickers, golden arches, ochred calendula. Raw-siennad oak leaves. Yellow yields. Mediates between stop and go. Makes school buses visible. Paints straight lines down the middle of black asphalt to keep the world right. In deciduous maturity, yellow releases the tree from its green youth, lets go minor gods of luminescence: wait, it says. Wait. Look.