Mumbling Detritus

It was in Quebec City, snow
squealed from a sinking sky, the wind
a flute, streets audience and cold
a drink of forgetfulness, when
the card house tumbled down, became
ruins.  We walked through them, ignored them,
cried because the walls resisted
completely being ground into
no problem mon Jamaican sand.

We are Canadian, I said,
half ice and half again a lake
whose water is frozen too long
into April.  The fish are rock,
the trees a repository
of how a green leaf converses
with rain, though you insisted that
there was a schedule not being
met, as though the buses were all
running empty from one pickup
to the next.  .Nothing here, move on. 
Move on, nothing here except a
crash of old words, nothing at all.

And yet, and yet.  In the silence
of staring out of a window
(winter and wind), of dissecting
time as though it was a newborn
dandelion — time loves us, time
loves us not — I imagined there
is a path which rock time doesn’t rule,
where change is a measurement of
speed and words well up, so sharp and
dangerous, unpredictable
as they slowly morph into our
crystalline, predictable state.