Outside My Window Xxiii Poem by Frank Avon

Only snow,
and ten below,
blossoms of snow
on the spruce
dark in the yard
standing in snow.

Indoor
on the twelfth night of Christmas
the Christmas cactus bloomed:
as red -
not as scarlet or magenta,
but somewhere thereabouts.

And what I read
by someone named Revell
was of the lovely Oothoon
and Henry David Thoreau
and phrases from Ashbery,
and in my mind
red melted

and the white uprose
as in the robes
of a heavenly choir
or the jewel
a Guarini might see
in a crystal of ice

Now it is night
time to draw the blind
a night without light
time to draw the blind