Patina
Near the window winter
blue light and belief
what happens incrementally
stays. Give her an old-fashioned
bathtub, a cape cod, a big fish story
about the one that didn't get away.
Give her Antarctica, anti-arctic, the melt
after the deep-freeze of the walk-in
at work, where the turnips and the radishes
look like crisp flowers.
This is no last July, no lost juggler,
the things that dance from their hands
make pictures on the horizon then land
again in the net of the palm.
A penny stuck in the sidewalk crack, upright
looks like a sun rising from concrete.
Nothing more, or less fantastic than that.