Across the street, the winter fog
Sifts slowly through dead
Air; drops heavy snow
Flakes on frozen silhouettes in white –
Tombstones watching like gray ghosts
In cemetery prison, my passing.

The memories of warmer seasons passing
Vaguely through my mind like fog
Arising from a lake, misty ghosts
Translucently appearing from some dark, dead
Place.  Against so dark a background they are white
And falling from the air, accumulate like snow.

Imprinted on the sidewalk snow
My footprints measure out the yards of passing
Time.  A trail that traces into white
Oblivion.  Land and sky become a single fog
Behind a white lace shroud that covers up the dead,
Forgetting them, the lonely ghosts.

And now appearing from outside my ghost-
Veiled ken, through curtain-snow
The headlight eyes of Charon’s dead
Suburban raft on Acheron Street passing
By is searching through the fog
For customers in shades of white

To take with him across the white
Water road.  I am no ghost,
And he sails off into the fog.
I dare not step into the snow
Drift wake left in his passing
I will not join the cemetery dead.

Those sleepers tucked away beneath dead
Earth, who would have caught with white
Silk ropes the sun if they had seen its passing,
Leave behind regretful ghosts
Who shiver in the falling snow
And clothe their naked lives in fog.

Although the fog forgets the dead
The snow remembers them in white
Like hungry ghosts or angels passing.