One morning, before the leaves began changing   I caught a piece of summer and poured it into a pitcher;      This I placed in the cellar on a shelf collecting dust .   Autumn, then winter, rose up from the sea, and my   Garden was a garden filled with unbroken snow.      No flower strained its face to the ice giants' whisper,   No life coloured the vision of a newborn Spring babe.   My cellar-water dripping into a pail      And I lifted my piece of summer   Like a piece of memory or a dream      Like these, caught on film   And carried it to the garden floes,   The wind turning drifting stars to madness.      Poured forth gracefully, this ctheric tincture   Lifts winter's coat-of-arms with coaxing aromas and electricity.   Used with vigilance, a Pitcher of Summer stirs a memory into swooning,   And bravely, the flowers of the past will stretch their limbs into the sky   While snow falls quietly all around.