An old woman shivering and smoking in the morning snowfall.

You sit on the bus stop bench
smoking your cigarette
like a cliche, your lungs
hardened like old metaphor

the snow
falls like a blind hand on your face

falls like a cold question
from heaven:
who are you?

and the earth is sorry
that her children give the warmth of their motion
to the empty air

you will sit there
till all your ashes have fallen
like a dark halo around your feet

and I love you like
the coming sun does
with the warm arc of my thought
skimming off across this new blinding snow

but who loves you like the earth
she who takes your form and makes it grow?