The fog is not your friend and dawn is nowhere to be found.

They are all wrong streets. You take each one.

These streets? You do not know them. But you do. Every step seems stopgap. That bus bench. These bike racks.

But your targets are in hiding. Your bull's eye is a secret. You're aiming at ghosts in snow. It's May.

You try to be a wife. You try to be mundane.

5 AM. One-quarter past. Distant chimes inform me this. A bell peal knells the mist. And sunlight’s not yet bludgeoning. But some light gets blood going. Last night it was snowing and now every path’s a pall. Though mine the only footfalls at this hour of awe. Above hangs a canopy of needle leaf. Below, the season’s mean deceit— that everything stays white and clean. It doesn’t, of course, but I wish it. My prayers are green with this intent, imploring winter wrens to trill and begging scuttling bucks come back. There’s something that I lack. A wryneck bullet-beaks a branch. His woodworm didn’t have a chance. What I miss, I’ve never had. But I am not a ghost. I am a guest. And life is thirst, at best. So do not strike me, Heart. I am, too, tinder. I’m flammable as birch bark, even damp. Blue spruce, bee-eater— be sweeter to me. Let larksong shudder to its January wheeze, but gift these hands a happiness just once. It is half passed. And I am cold. Another peal has tolled. I’ve told the sum of my appeals. I need not watch for fox. They do not congregate at dawn. But I would, were I one.