Poemunity — your poem community

The snow is deep on the ground. Always the light falls Softly down on the hair of my belovèd. This is a good world. The war has failed. God shall not forget us. Who made the snow waits where love is. Only a few go mad. The sky moves in its whiteness Like the withered hand of an old king. God shall not forget us. Who made the sky knows of our love. The snow is beautiful on the ground. And always the lights of heaven glow Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children.

In the Metro Toronto Zoo

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,” Serge told me in New York one December night. “So when I look at the sky, I see the past?” “Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International, suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. *   *   * The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read: The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood though it tastes strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine. As I tell Sameetah this, we are still seven miles away. “And you know the flowers of the saguaros bloom only at night?” We are driving slowly, the road is glass. “Imagine where we are was a sea once. Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly sapphire, and the past is happening quickly: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,” Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved arms. And we are driving by the ocean that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky taking rapid notes on us as we turn at Tucson Boulevard and drive into the airport, and I realize that the earth is thawing from longing into longing and that we are being forgotten by those arms. *   *   * At the airport I stared after her plane till the window was again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog shut its doors behind me on Alvernon, and I breathed the dried seas the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered another moment that refers only to itself: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens, air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died. And just before the lights did flood her again, melting the frost of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea can be heard, a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing.

out from under it and down the mountain slope it comes flat on its back white skirt and billowy petticoats blowing back over its head, whiplashing rickety pine sapling as it passes, bowling boulders left and right until it comes to a juddering sudden heart- thumping stop just shy of the little village in the valley far below.

Stand here by my side and turn, I pray, On the lake below, thy gentle eyes; The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray, And dark and silent the water lies; And out of that frozen mist the snow In wavering flakes begins to flow; Flake after flake They sink in the dark and silent lake. See how in a living swarm they come From the chambers beyond that misty veil; Some hover awhile in air, and some Rush prone from the sky like summer hail. All, dropping swiftly or settling slow, Meet, and are still in the depths below; Flake after flake Dissolved in the dark and silent lake. Here delicate snow-stars, out of the cloud, Come floating downward in airy play, Like spangles dropped from the glistening crowd That whiten by night the milky way; There broader and burlier masses fall; The sullen water buries them all– Flake after flake– All drowned in the dark and silent lake. And some, as on tender wings they glide From their chilly birth-cloud, dim and gray, Are joined in their fall, and, side by side, Come clinging along their unsteady way; As friend with friend, or husband with wife, Makes hand in hand the passage of life; Each mated flake Soon sinks in the dark and silent lake. Lo! while we are gazing, in swifter haste Stream down the snows, till the air is white, As, myriads by myriads madly chased, They fling themselves from their shadowy height. The fair, frail creatures of middle sky, What speed they make, with their grave so nigh; Flake after flake, To lie in the dark and silent lake! I see in thy gentle eyes a tear; They turn to me in sorrowful thought; Thou thinkest of friends, the good and dear, Who were for a time, and now are not; Like these fair children of cloud and frost, That glisten a moment and then are lost, Flake after flake– All lost in the dark and silent lake. Yet look again, for the clouds divide; A gleam of blue on the water lies; And far away, on the mountain-side, A sunbeam falls from the opening skies, But the hurrying host that flew between The cloud and the water, no more is seen; Flake after flake, At rest in the dark and silent lake.

Ghost sun half hidden, where did you go? There’s always a mother of some other creature born to fight for her young. But crawl out of your hide, walk upright like a man, & you may ask if hunger is the only passion as you again lose yourself in a white field’s point of view. In this glacial quiet nothing moves except— then a flash of eyes & nerves. If cornered in your head by cries from a cave in another season, you can’t forget in this landscape a pretty horse translates into a man holding a gun.

I believe in this stalled magnificence, this churning chaos of traffic, a beast with broken spine, its hoarse voice hooded in feathers and mist; the baffled eyes wink amber and slowly darken. Of men and women suddenly walking, stumbling with little sleighs in search of Tibetan houses — dust from a far-off mountain already whitens their shoulders. When evening falls in blurred heaps, a man losing his way among churches and schoolyards feels under his cold hand the stone thoughts of that city, impassable to all but a few children who went on into the hidden life of caves and winter fires, their faces glowing with disaster.

Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills, in imitation of motion that moves the way static cascades down screens when the cable zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker of legibility that dissipates before it can be interpolated into any succession of imagery. One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water molecules that accumulate in drifts too soon strewn with sand, hewn into browning mounds by plow blade, left to turn to slush.