In Mourning

Dead leafless claws of winter branches
frozen against the starting sky, the newborn light
pink growing, somehow growing, toward red and life.
The branches cold-preserved, unmoving, limbs not
as animals in formalin-bloated jars but
as the incorruptible saint’s body:
flawed and too unsettling,
posed in death, alive by clay,
too obscene for any word but prayer.