Ice Flowers

 

exhaled in the night

out of the humid dream,

engraved on the white

pane in the alien morning,

 

writhe where they fall, thrust

tendrils into blackness

toward vision only just

recovered, tenuous;

 

then shudder and dissolve,

leaving a hum of nerve –

the mind’s unsought creation,

the heart’s strange exaltation.
 

 Jan Schreiber