for Roland Forrester 1926-1993
	A transition, from one state to another, of any element, is only accomplished by violence (though this violence be immeasurably slow). The remainder of our text shall be concerned with this phenomenon in its varied forms: revolutionary evaporations, cataclysmic meltings, excruciating condensations.
	--Dr. Noble Möll An Introduction to Variable States, 1896
	I I've stood on thinner sheets. Took crunching walks On leaf-embodying and lumpy glass To a sidewalk's abrupt end, along a bright Section of newly-insulated path, Over a prickling hump of weedy dam And onto this broad opening in the words: lake, Brown language adrift with plants and fish, Masked underneath a civilizing white Tectonic crystalline, a cloudy plate.
	10 Sun burned horizon black, and then went down; The honed air slipped and whisked across the lake. Flare, pile of glassleaves!--no--fail, pyre: An undecided dusk gave out at last. Snow deepened to an ashen regolith, A lunar cast. Too cold. I found a path; An alphabet of shadows followed me, Seeming to indicate a leak of light, The thinnest wash of dusk: plum aquarelle. (A shallow chill: of ghostleaves fluttering?
	20 Bleak conjugations rustling in the woods?) A haunted aura deepened, spread, and blurred. AM VIVID.(Where?) LOOK BARN.(The last glow fell Along the roofridge of a looming, chinked Abandoned barn; a broken vane withheld Its ripening signal from prevailing words): Something encoded in the characters Of winter branches. I could just make out QUARTZ HIVING DAMP. FLOW BACK,SEX JOY! Creak. --A wind came up; the rusted vane revived:
	30 Its bent N pointed toward me; W To sky. I hurried down the icehumped path, And that was that: day left unfinished. Night. (A double me is more than twice enough.) I marked my place; exhausted, went to bed. Then dreamed; awakened: saw my old alarm Oddly aglow; but quickly focused on Its Liquid Crystal face-blue numerals, Crisp and reassuring. Woke next day, Drank coffee, read newspaper, dressed, went out.
	40 A mere reader, I read mirrors, fear wet play; But find a mothball scatter on the lawn.
	II (Hail fallen. Damper.) I retraced my steps Along uncertain melt and shifting gloss To somewhere near that spot: an empty barn (I think I glimpsed a black sleigh through the door, Cobwebbed and rotting, piled with newspapers); A house with broken windows--snow inside, And buckling front porch; the facing page A homely pond's translation of the scene.
	50 Icicles pattered Morse, then quieted; Fractures abounded; crystal refastenings Veined sturdy puddles under seamless sky The silvered inside of a vacuum jar. Following a sentence through the woods I found the lake (stop; foot-test: one step out), Tried its crackling solidity, Then walked the distance of its false expanse Onto (cold, crackless air) the other bank: Fir epaulets; rafts of sandy spar;
	60 Abandoned border-crossings. Past strange trees A tangled log was partly visible, Transliterated into alphabets Splitting and sapless, partly burnt, part curled Like old dry vines. Whew. I tromped across Black sticks with weedy diacriticals, Vowel-slips of ooze and consonants of ice, Carefully sounding out each patch of thaw Against a heavy, insulated sole, And stopped among birches--seeing just ahead
	70 Cyrillic of a slumped barbed-wire fence: My blunt feet felt another continent. Bare vines; indecipherable cold. Just past those empty forms were, glimmering, A plaza and planted trees: beyond the shades Of iron poles and humps of sooty snow, A crowd of citizens confronting tanks. III Let's stop and eat an apple here--fair peel, Yellow Delicious is my favorite-- Feels ripe. I brought a flask of coffee, too.
	80 Let's eat an apple and be fortunate. A Frenchman hears, on record, real Piaf; Another, weary, stoops to tie his shoes; Elsewhere a voice interprets, in the bath, "The complex genitalia of the blues;" Her husband's out-coat, mittens, shirt--My love!-- The underwear comes off, boots take too long, --And outside in the cold, key touches lock. A child picks up a phone and hears "No. Not..." Someone is vacuuming the second tier.
	90 An adolescent girl says "Thanks a lot." I crunch: my breath-steam makes you disappear. Who isn't tangent to some other's plot? Wet boots print blanks across the ghostly snow. IV Three died (August, 1991). But more or less, through lurching politics Gun steel stayed cold; witnesses remained, Felt and withstood fear's pliers through the night. Most tank-crews disobeyed their orders; held; Restrained steel treads (from crushing blood-stuck flesh
	100 Or bursting screams in lungs, minds smeared from heads); Heartbeats but stopped a moment; then went on. A man sat near a heap of paving stones, Bottle of gasoline between his boots, Discussing false dawn with an architect; People stood smoking by a barricade (Jumble of twisted reinforcing rods, Old heavy plumbing, wooden pallets, doors). They're biodegradable, these apple cores.
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