When the bare vimens show

When the bare vimens show their true spidery self
and the crisp inner tuck of oak leaves is only an else
of sweet green shoots that spring left wryly behind
a hinting of freeze comes blue, and ice enters the mind.

Eight vimens are barely enough to finish a failing scene
but tangling right, tingling in October, to drop and scare
from a broken web the long lost girl who enters there-
she says she'll not dress again, sad to say she just means

the end of artifice, the end of endless chatter, the end
of stories of birds who flew from Christmas trees fast
in the hazy winter of red cocktails crazed warm bend,
when laughed icy green laughs are impossibly icy at last.

A bald head preaches slowly with a mouth totally gone dry,
in coughing begs for bags of masks from one too tired to try.