By Robert Castagna

I stood in front of a Winterberry tree alongside you. The red berries hung, fake like plastic, with their ruddy stems, thousands of them, like Christmas tree decorations. There were no leaves, just bare branches, some of which were sawed off and gone. The light was bright and the air winter cold, providing that stark translucence to the molecules that enable sharp sky blues to suffocate the earth. Within each molecule there were more spaces and that space was filled with the cold-hard facts of winter too; and then more spaces, smaller still, ad infinitum. I turned to you, standing there, looking at the tree with your imaginative sorrow; two poets searching the same thing but seeing it different.