At last, a country large enough to hold melancholy,

the melancholy of a family adjusted to cold,

the cold which dwells at the top of birch trees.

White hair of mother no metaphorical snow

but real, crystalline dreams exhaled into cold,

and the boy with the milk route, returning home

to strip and stand naked before a kerosene heater.

Behind him, distant hours of dawn rise and rise

but do not break. His father’s breath pops and cracks

amongst the room’s somnambulant trees. The boy

shudders once, while white owls wait in birch trees,

those trees whose shadows forks the pink horizon.