(the final grit of a dark winter)

1.

They are sweeping it away now:
the tiny specks of stones
the skin broken from the asphalt
and all the dust that fell from
the sky for months now.

I saw a grandmother stooped in the sun
this morning, sweeping,
and two boys
and the old man by the high school;
the one holding the stop sign and the traffic:
he likely will lay down his red sign in the utilities closet
trading it for a broom and a dust pan.

The gristles scrape at the cement. Good-bye, the people say,
speaking and extending through the gristles and their gritted teeth;
they grunt in exertion drawing away the anamnesis:
the eternity of the small days,
the deja-vu of black barren branches,
the fingerprints of the icicles,
the claw marks left by the plows,
and all the unutterable words.
they say good-bye.

2.

And thus, we too, must sweep away the remembrance:
the dispassionate agonies,
the emptiness,
leave dormancy behind,
and the inscape of inclement, brittle spirits,
we too must cleave from our insufficient prayers,
that rose and returned
again and again
finally melting
like the last snow in April.

3.

We must sweep as they sweep.
Not as though at an end, but at a beginning.
For they have escaped the weight of darkness.

---

Of his writing, Kenneth Godoy says, “Poetry is bound to my soul.”