Suspended

by Susan Keiser

Winter has frozen her work now,
secret names shimmering, safe, anguished.
Lulled, we enter it like a rocking cradle,
the white, vaulted room
where frost settles into glass,
where we shrink with the noise of death
drawing itself across the snow.

Our hands are older than our eyes, some say.
Some say our memories are forgiven,
that we’ve come to a place
famed for the absurd,

but this is the part where we light the village farolitos,
like children accustomed to time travel and invisibility,
striking our matches in the dark.