| In winter we comfort our dead with talk.
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| We entertain them with our idle gossip.
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| We whisper the news while our breath freezes.
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| We line up at the storage shed where their bodies lie
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| Awaiting the great thaws of uncertain spring.
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| We tell them how the frost was dark this year
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| And steep, how business perked up at the quarries,
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| What happened to those botanists after the avalanche . . .
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| The padlock on their door is lumpy
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| With a blackened ice
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| But our damp spurts of breath revive
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| The grieving hinges. Murmurous petals of frost
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| Cloud the numbed metal.
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| And quicker now,
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| More hurried, as the whisperers file
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| Behind the convenience store:
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| How a yellow stray
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| Littered beneath the baptistry and defiled the stones
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| And was drowned with all her brood, how Coleman saw
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| Crows build nests of unknown wood in the old foundry,
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| How hailstones fell for three days laced with blood . . .
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| It's comforting to chat even if
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| No answers return. The winter shapes our words.
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| The widower drinks, the widow squeezes shut
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| Her eyes, imagining the bluish stain
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| Corruption spreads across a loved complexion.
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| Come back! they whisper, I'm lonesome here without you!
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| But then, as the winter drags, I'm glad you're there
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| At last . . . where I can love you finally . . .
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Beyond the door they lie
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| Snug in their salt till spring. Some prefer
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| The new crematory in Schenectady but for most
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| Of us, winter is unthinkable without
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| The long peace of our conversations.
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In April, when the gravediggers return
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| Staggering, soused to the gills, on overtime,
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| And the black lock thaws into rusty rain
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| And they bear them out through the open shed
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| Into the flowering cemetery,
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Then we can mourn.
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