From the Mozart Express

	Vienna to Munich

          by David Chorlton

Where Vienna dissolves into landscape
summer cabins stand
wrapped in frost, power off,
each with a shiver
trapped behind drawn curtains.
A plume of smoke

from an isolated farmhouse
ties open land
to the sky, while
in whispering mist a man

in his indigo anorak walks
a black dog
led slowly by his thoughts
up an unblemished hill,
and a truce has been called

by the snow
woven into the branches
of a crow-hearted forest
locked tight
as an old and bitter grievance.
The treaty

is a text of punctuation marks
positioned sparsely: a signpost

as a comma, a hunting blind
a colon, and two firs
miles apart parentheses
containing silence.