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January Thaw

Cleveland, Ohio
Jan. 1989


cold touched briefly
then suddenly disappeared
with wind-driven
sunshine breathing blue into the sky
and blue into the Lake Erie waters
which in past years might hold
adventurers who dare venture
onto a white frozen plain
walking off the edge into Canada

this morning
the lake laps gently
on the sandy grains and gravel
and it smiles shorely
with the laughing lake gulls
that feast on the few unfrozen fish
littering the beach silver
with bodies half-buried sideways
looking up with one eye up
to an empty space beyond the clouds

and the other eye stares down
into my wandering tracks
that melt into the present
like the jagged outlines
of the downtown skyscrapers
that smooth themselves
to the horizon's distant line
defining the spherical curve
circling  cycles
with the shifting shadows
of a northern Ohio winter

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Copyright © 1989 by Wataru Ebihara