Paris, 7 A.M.

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment: / some hands point histrionically one way / and some point others, from the ignorant faces. / Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge / so much that days are journeys round the suburbs, / circles surrounding stars, overlapping circles. / The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers / is a spread pigeon’s wing. / Winter lives under a pigeon’s wing, a dead wing with damp feathers. // Look down into the courtyard. All the houses / are built that way, with ornamental urns / set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons / take their walks. It is like introspection / to stare inside, or retrospection, / a star inside a rectangle, a recollection: / this hollow square could easily have been there. / — The childish snow forts, built in flashier winters, / could have reached these proportions and been houses; / the mighty snow-forts, four, five, stories high, / withstanding spring as sand-forts do the tide, / their walls, their shape, could not dissolve and die, / only be overlapping in a strong chain, turned to stone, / and grayed and yellowed now like these. // Where is the ammunition, the piled-up balls / with the star-splintered hearts of ice? / This sky is no carrier-warrior-pigeon / escaping endless intersecting circles. / It is a dead one, or the sky from which a dead one fell. / The urns have caught his ashes or his feathers. / When did the star dissolve, or was it captured / by the sequence of squares and squares and circles, circles? / Can the clocks say; is it there below, / about to tumble in snow?