The damp light today sponges up
in your finger nails, you turn sideways
always to lance
the hailstorm approaching

our sandstone town or snap elastic
the half-eaten apple
in dawn. I asked and was disgusted

to drink the colorless horizon.
Crags crawl up the shoreline.
The cast-iron cooking pot sheds rust

over the kitchen floor as if
to have a mind of winter were to be
winter with a fist shackled
in the frozen bucket, shackled and blue

and peeling from myself. I come down slowly
in lambskin to touch
the fractured femur, to Hail Mary
and open the wallpaper

mist in blue water
for this is a morning of
numbly stuck ocean-salted faces.
Dry electric winter, you tear me

heavenward, silence so vast
it annihilates everything. I have a head
yet no metallic stethoscope.
What sort of man am I made of?