Margaret Avison

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The Christmas twigs crispen crispen To make crisp and needles rattle Along the window-ledge. A solitary pearl Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party Lies in the suety, suety Fatty; from suet, an animal fat used in cooking to create tallow snow-luminous plainness Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them. And all the furniture that circled stately And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses Into its previous largeness. I remember Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave Where cold so little can contain; I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust, And the long loop of winter wind Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus Arcturus The brightest star in the northern sky, located in the constellation Boötes down To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard, And the still window-ledge. Gentle and just pleasure It is, being human, to have won from space This unchill, unchill Warmed, thawed habitable interior Which mirrors quietly the light Of the snow, and the new year.

Saturday I ran to Mytilene. Bushes and grass along the glass-still way Were all dabbled with rain And the road reeled with shattered skies. Towards noon an inky, petulant wind Ravelled the pools, and rinsed the black grass round them. Gulls were up in the late afternoon And the air gleamed and billowed And broadcast flung astringent spray All swordy-silver. I saw the hills lie brown and vast and passive. The men of Mytilene waited restive Until the yellow melt of sun. I shouted out my news as I sped towards them That all, rejoicing, could go down to dark. All nests, with all moist downy young Blinking and gulping daylight; and all lambs Four-braced in straw, shivering and mild; And the first blood-root up from the ravaged beaches Of the old equinox; and frangible robins' blue Teethed right around to sun: These first we loudly hymned; And then The hour of genesis When the first moody firmament Swam out of Arctic chaos, Orbed solidly as the huge frame for this Cramped little swaddled creature's coming forth To slowly, foolishly, marvellously Discover a unique estate, held wrapt Away from all men else, which to embrace Our world would have to stretch and swell with strangeness. This made us smile, and laugh at last. There was Rejoicing all night long in Mytilene.