Ice Storm, By Margaret Gibson

Saplings hoop over.

The pines list, steep and grave.

I want to say gravid.

Roofs all over Connecticut give.

Someone somewhere

must be homeless, dark, and drifting

to madness with all this glitter.

Red buds closed into clear ice

seem to swell out.

Plump, I’d say, as currants.

At night the child

I will never give to the universe

for safekeeping

skates over my dreams of the ice crust

hurtling into all that white.

From “Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems” by Margaret Gibson. (Louisiana State University Press: 200 pp., $24.95)