The animal of winter is dying,
its white body everywhere
in collapse and stabbed at
by straws of light, a leaving
to believe in as the air
slowly fills with darkness
and water drains from the tub
where my daughter, watching it
lower around her, feeling it
go, says about the only thing
she can as if it were a long-
kept breath going with her
blessing of dribble and fleck.
Down it swirls a living drill
vanishing toward a land
where tomorrow already
fixes its bright eye on a man
muttering his way into a crowd,
saying about the only thing
he can before his body
goes boom. And tomorrow,
I will count more dark shapes
tumbling from the sky, birds
returning to scarcity, offering
in their seesawing songs
a kind of liquidity.