By Subhaga Crystal Bacon

It hangs over the western crest

like smoke from forgotten fire.

Spreads over the horizon

until there’s no peak, no valley.

Snow flakes flitter here

like cold ash, sifting through air

without touching ground.

Sunrise casts a pallor

over eastern sky that picks out shapes in clouds—

continents and seas

still shifting, unfixed—

now flares like a blinding golden eye.

Then obscured occult-like

in a translucent veil of gray.

Owl hoots in the pine, and silence settles

over the frozen land.

Sleeping. Waiting. Warming.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon has two collections of poetry, Elegy with a Glass of Whisky, BOA,Editions, 2004, and Blue Hunger, Methow Press, forthcoming June 2020.