The shortest day, mercifully so, lessening light
Astronomically the one rule calculable, luminosity.
Dry canals flicker bark-pitch under sky blanketed grey.
New boots, half price at the border, shorten my step
Planted, enmired, mud-suctioned to hay and rock.
It’s 15:22 though the sky cares less for numbers than I.
Clouds shake their breath off with wispy shoulder
Disregarding walkers below, lost in foreign shades,
We the burdened, the calamitous, the retuned notes
Cast eyes to a dimming horizon slunk atop dead branches.
It’s winter, her solstice slowing time at the axis,
And happily so, no rush, no filter, just stragglers in exile
For a time, while the light slants low, configuring us
Country-free, wanderers, timed projections sur les Pyrenees.
In the gaze of the other 