March: Year-day 65

      
                                             
                                       
March: Year-day 65

Can't think, my lights going brown and brown, black,
the toll of the ice storms mounting past thought
while hands reach anxiously for candles brought
from a storeroom somewhere, a dead bee's sac,
fires for each hall providing us a track
of vision, a sanctuary charm, caught
as we are without electric, distraught
yet giggly, so suddenly peeled years back.

First I, then Mark, turned the register's crank:
room charge, tax--the x read of zeeing out,
then the z read, and the x read again,
zero after zero, proving the bank,
the mechanical day, was full about,
balanced to nothings by the hands of men.

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