JACOB GRIFFIN HALL

Shapeshifter

The air is crystalline, a mimetic hearse let shift through a slow stream
of snow – the cold let be cold in itself
and in its movements. One slate black and one inconsolable
white. 

There is only duality
for as long as the body
is guided.

So many things can be a body – a thought, for instance. A leg of slush
on the sidewalk that calls barberry
and takes you to a word on the river. There is a moth
with shackled wings

rested on my tongue,
a cool delirium
of icepick and burgundy. 

I am a cicada spring. I feel paisley dust in my ears and there is a voice
sealed with frozen windowpanes. It is inaudible, but nonetheless speaks
about thorn brush and wilted eaves, about the inescapable texture

of freshly torn bread. A pendulum let through the wicked branches
of a peeling white cypress. I turn to myself in the ice-wrought night and I
suspect that forgiveness is simply an effigy for mourning. Each willow
will fall

wilting gray
into a patchwork
of seedless frost, 

and the winds will shiver faceless to the bone.