December in Binghamton

It is the language of winter this morning.

Its rules spoken in the ice of words

floating in their new thick sheets

along the hip and thigh curves—gone cold now—

of the Susquehanna.

Walk across the bridge into a grammar of a downtown below freezing you hear.

And a windchill no more than 12. You turn. Look. Pull

your scarf tighter. But there is no one. And you realize it must have been you. Your own voice blowing past. Thoughts lost before they are. Silence crashing into the street. Silence becoming

an alphabet of letters

cracking sharp, fragile, precarious

in the bite of this December wind.

It is

the language of winter this morning

and the language of winter is:

A whisper. A shout. An ache.

An old woman wearing green mittens.

A group of teenagers spilling over the sidewalk in front of the school.

A boy with an unzipped coat and another without gloves

who shiver. Stand under a tree. Pass a cigarette back and forth.

A girl in tight jeans

whose laughter becomes steam

as the one with the dark hat

pushes her down into the snow.

          They kiss.

          You see them

          moving through the language of winter, into

          a grammar they don’t yet know.

Into a place of chapped lips and wild storms.

Into seasons of urgent clamoring and naked limbs.

And on the bridge the man with the navy pea coat

— collar high around his chin

and holding a can of Red Dog—

smiles, waves good morning, says just something to keep me warm.

And this winter language you hear too

in the bodies of the ducks skimming the surface

one after the other

lost along the water.

2004/2011