Bye-bye
–Derek Sheffield

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.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash