There are bare winter days when the sea is kin
to mountain country, crouching in gray plumage,
a brief minute blue, long hours with waves like pale
lynxes vainly seeking hold in the beach-gravel.

On such a day wrecks might come from the sea searching
for their owners, settling in the town’s din, and drowned
crews blow landward, thinner than pipe-smoke.

(The real lynxes are in the north, with sharpened claws
and dreaming eyes. In the north, where day
lives in a mine both day and night.

Where the sole survivor may sit
at the borealis stove and listen
to the music of those frozen to death.)