Shadows of Night Trees (Feininger’s)

Trees were shadows themselves, just themselves against the sleet
of fog and streetlamp,

Burgkühnauer Alee, powdered with triangular light
branches open in a V as words in mimic: visible, vacant,

a face with its pale mask behind the closed curtain of winter

a landscape icing over, out walking in obscurity
somewhat “morbidly sensitive” it was said of him at the Bauhaus

and so he went at night into the darkness as if the fixity of a face,
the rigor of a practice he hated and the cold itself
could animate shadows in sequenced progression—first one, then the
other—

forcing the illusion of movement, as trees (from a foreground pool of
black)
grayed themselves slowly into the distance.