The mind in morning

rouses from white, warm sheets, sure not to wake the body before

tiptoeing out to the freshly cut cold, conferring with the Crimson

Frost birches huddled at the fence like thin, sad teenage girls—

gathers early morning papers and milk-fog reminiscence of waking

dreams, while all this time measuring the curves that Crimson Frost

are slow but thankful to show in their tentative sway, this way,

and that, bending into barely-there deviations, come hither

mathematics eluding quantification in the rise and pour

of morning over the new snow-smooth yard, before

the final curl back into the memorized folds of a body,

calculated, now stirring in the bare-all light of a bedroom—

the mind leans into it, slipping out of solipsism like a silk robe.