Lyrics

When he leaves it will be winter,
Long and impossibly heated,
With its endless rows of one-story corn stalks,
Boiling in their green-tasseled streets,
Drifted over in their sub-zero pleats.

It will be Winter,
Buried in the inches,
Burying each freezing second’s splinter,
He as he is leaving takes his everything, his summer left,
Lands burst of all harvest,
Clear to hinter.

When he leaves, taking every leaf,
Save what needle pokes the pine and bleeds the cradle,
Spun of winter with its whirlwind dreidel,
Dipped deep into wells with its summer-most ladle,
Hard-won from its solid form.

Thundered by the thickening in his sudden ice storm,
Out of his house and far from his sun,
When he leaves he will shade treeless,
Dug in the skies we tread beneath us,
Marked with his script in stone.

The most forgotten summer ever known,
Burnt frostbit and born outgrown,
Leaving our battered fields scattered with the chaff more cheated than sown,
Leaving hungry nights gnawing each day’s naked bone,
The search for solstice his leaving leaves alone.