Reginald Shepherd

Unsolved: frost clotting a broken
tree, a clutch of feathers giving up
a thing hooked on a branch. Image
wrack of silver-leafed plants taken

to be snow, something driven by the sea
of words for winter wind, when winter's
not yet here: Artemisia stellarana,
Senecio matitimus. A box of curiosity

the cold unfolds, Stella Mara, steering
by angular displacement, an ephemeris
of the moon for every noon and midnight.
(Radius of heading, bearing down, point of arrival

departing for perspective dwindling
to pipe-stemmed rain, the sifting mist
horizon recedes from place.) Rust-red
September ends here, stains wet pavements

as if summer forgot itself, sprawled out and bled
to death: an early iteration, wholly lacking
the capacity for flight. Blue sign posts, news
reports and labels, events of evergreens

tracking and measuring storms. Star
-fish, starfoot, death by synecdoche
and star-shaped leaves: sky fallen through
part of a hole, all dowse by now. I heard

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