At dawn the birch trees are ice-smacked:
             shocked and glassy.

The man limps across the snow, like a toad,
             his only illness memory.

Light presses against his eyes,
             like a shard of the bottle

he broke over the night
             — though it was the evening,

softer than skin, that had tempted him
             from hiding.

He recalls the suckling: iron-bitter
             as the earth, yet river-silken.

Then the black sky: pricked with stars
             like a medieval device and cold as iron.

How the birch trees, pale as naked men,
             were flayed against them.