Snow Refracting on Cedars

When you made love in the shower the morning
before he died in the boating accident,
you wore nothing but your wedding ring, and the
sight of the two of you,
through the pebbled glass of the stall door,
the sight of the two of you,
had there been anyone to see,
had the daubed thickness of a Van Gogh,
the swirled livingness of a Renoir,
the beige desolation of a desert O'Keefe.
Only the lustrous annular permanence of that
precious metallic band seemed
out of place as,
with him behind, your fingers clawed
at the door, everything
else a rushing, steaming, wet, soft, fastness
racing to a conclusion passing then,
past. Again, had there been anyone
looking at the keepsake pictures of your deceased parents,
they could have observed the sheriff climbing
the steps of the porch,
then knocking just outside the screen door
--- his uneasy regret-to-inform speech ---
they would have seen it all reflected in the
framed glass that protected
those photographs, as in the
tranquil precision of Vermeer.
Had there been anyone to brave
the snowstorm outside the courthouse, the air
solidified into a three-dimensional rush-hour of
unique flakes, distances diasappeared
behind the strange shapes of gusts
--- tumbleweeds, funnelclouds,
horizontal tracer-streaks,
layered laced curtains pasting themselves to
the rooted wings of weary cedars --- as if nothing
far away were real, and
only what is close to you
exists --- and had they peered to see
the black mesh of your mourning veil
on the witness stand, draped in gloomy shadows,
the courtroom wick-lit by oil lanterns
with the power out --- justice
extremely dark but never blind,
it would have been the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio,
with a pointillist haze from Seurat
that met their eyes through
the blown glass panes.

In the darkness of that room
was the sound of snowfall. Caught in the glass
of your tears, a single aquifer whose wells
are legion, clung the scent of pines,
as if hung in a museum to distant lovers
(the ones who do not exist),
beyond the scrub of reason,
or the clutch of years.