After the Ice Storm

The tree limbs cracked, the stopped car rocked,
The village blacked out with the storm.
The shape of houses shuttered, locked,
Weighed down the dark with darker form.
We looked up at the boughs, stripped bare
Months ago with the season’s turning,
But clawing now the anguished air
To plead some hopeless case of yearning.
The wind whipped round us and our faces
Burned with the dry burn of the ice,
In that most emptied out of places,
Unmapped, unmeasured, shorn of price.
One night was all it took to give
What men had built back to the earth,
Leaving it as no place to live
Or contemplate a second birth.
We stood there, though, for what seemed long,
The ice encasing everything.
We listened to wind void of song.
We felt cold’s unintended sting.