(i)

What remains barely the weather report: sentencing labours of history

against all beginnings, the maples

leafless, the houses barely porous.

(ii)

I ride roads I am not familiar with,

a figure of speech, chrome strips

between windows. To the south,

burial mounds. Resolution

deep and simpatico. Northwards:

 the lake effect, the snow plough.

(iii)

Deer go down to bow and gun,

roadkill is a ‘cull’: beauty

in the eye of rhetoric

keeps the engine

ticking over.

(iv)

Cornstalks like rotted Ceres’

thin black teeth. To end with this.

A season of political arrangements,

remnant snow quarried

like that pitiless ocean.

(v)

The driver must resist

all beauty, the smell

of an unfamiliar passenger.

A door rattles, the car

is almost new.

It is shut properly. Speed limit.

Farm machinery. A (solitary)

white field enclosed

by thawed pages.

(vi)

Maples, oak ... all kinds.

A tornado ripped through here

 three months ago and didn’t

touch the houses either side.

Birds warble in the engine

cavity. A cord of wood

stretches out below

the kitchen window.

He says we listen

differently.