Robert Haight

How is it that the snow amplifies the silence, slathers the black bark on limbs, heaps along the brush rows? Some deer have stood on their hind legs to pull the berries down. Now they are ghosts along the path, snow flecked with red wine stains. This silence in the timbers. A woodpecker on one of the trees taps out its story, stopping now and then in the lapse of one white moment into another.

It will not stay. But this morning we wake to pale muslin stretched across the grass. The pumpkins, still in the fields, are planets shrouded by clouds. The Weber wears a dunce cap and sits in the corner by the garage where asters wrap scarves around their necks to warm their blooms. The leaves, still soldered to their branches by a frozen drop of dew, splash apple and pear paint along the roadsides. It seems we have glanced out a window into the near future, mid-December, say, the black and white photo of winter carefully laid over the present autumn, like a morning we pause at the mirror inspecting the single strand of hair that overnight has turned to snow.