Seven Degrees This Morning

Seven Degrees This Morning

So cold now that the stream, once blue,
has turned black. Even so, coastal
birds haunt the ice. If you look long
enough, maybe you'll see them. Each year
winter does this to me, buries me in waves
of seamless dismay, dumps me where
women slip on the ice, women who want
nothing more than to walk into the west
without a broken hip. The new moon
of Sagittarius promises me truelove.
So says my online astrologer. Yet in a minute
I will get up and look out the window again,
consider the thickness of ice, the absence of birds.
I can't see things clearly from this height.
Maybe I should turn my back on the sky, lie
on the couch, open the latest news
in the New York Times, consider all
the ways the world has discovered to cry.