Frost Bitten

This dark brick back yard, and grassless dirt,
stalkshadowed that evokes itself
while I wait in its hollow.
Shackled, that heavy-shouldered
garden hose draped like a plastic boa,
green on the cold metal neck of a fencepole.

Stone, ice breathed
in and being in screeches its grains clean
down my throat, sweats and dampens in the
alveoli of my lungs, and recrystallizes minute
Frost being not in
cold lungs and crunching dirt.

Tufted waste land of ground, garden sometimes, with an
unsettled slope, like a curtain torn
down and left untouched,
to inhale itself on the floor
in the mysterious flattening process,
What slab is on you pressing your grains
so uncrumbled close, stones
barely meeting your
surface with their turtleshell faces,
painted dustmottle marmoreal maps
until the rain will wash them bare
and spiteless merciless thaw bleed the frozen wound in new old channels.

Not interrupting the cold labor of the flayed
garden unmoving under rusted leaves, baredirt
and broken buckets staring up, someone's breath
limns my mind, condensation slacking and tense again
all as one,
and with the next beat breath is veiled and gone.

I would rather freeze to the spot 'til
it come back, or break.
Sun will boil me away.