The day wakes vague,
open to attack,
shuffling along the forest edge,
black on white,
sooty, frost in its pubic hair,
Eos mumbling in roots & scree fields
in thirty degrees of cold,
dawn a coerced movement of light
with numb fingertips
and blameless culpability
that intensifies
to Johan Helmich Roman’s (1694–1758) Drottningholm Music,
until, already at 13:24 on Epiphany,
at lat. 65.999° N / long. 22.027° E in Niemisel,
Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682–1738) signs off the daylight
with Symphonies & Fanfares for the King’s Supper,
and dusk darkens backward
up through all the kingdom’s treacherous alluvial fans,
rolling dark-voiced boulders,
dull beneath the reinforced glass of January torrents,
down from the towering glaciers’ enthroned glass organs,
close to the sky’s just-intoned hoverings