134 Winter poems

Less a nip than gnaw, the way a goat, tethered, will ruminate a rope; the way each

A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the temples we'd gone to see. One green wave moved in the violet sea like the UN Building on big evenings, green and wet while the sky turns violet. A few almond trees had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes out of the blue looking pink in the light. A gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. They're just going over the hill. The green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh, and a green-copper steeple and streaks of cloud beginning to glow. I can't get over how it all works in together like a woman who just came to her window and stands there filling it jogging her baby in her arms. She's so far off. Is it the light that makes the baby pink? I can see the little fists and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog-size lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips. It's the shape of a tulip. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. It's a day like any other.

The cold grows colder, even as the days grow longer, February's mercury vapor light buffing but not defrosting the bone-white ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot. This is the time of year that's apt to put a hammerlock on a healthy appetite, old anxieties back into the night, insomnia and nightmares into play; when things in need of doing go undone and things that can't be undone come to call, muttering recriminations at the door, and buried ambitions rise up through the floor and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall; and hope's a reptile waiting for the sun.

It is all kind of lovely that I know what I attend here now the maturity of snow has settled around forming a sort of time pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine in any colors to be chosen and everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen soon enough the primary rough erosion of what white fat it will occur stiff yellows O beautiful beautifully austere be gotten down to, that much rash and achievement that would promote to, but now I know my own red network electrifying this welcome annual hush.

The tint of the sky between sunset and night. And wandering with you and your nephew in that maze, half-lost—Madrid of the Austrias—looking for Plaza of the Green Cross where, days before you arrived, an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels straddling the curb, and so the van heading for the barracks that morning had to slow to squeeze past . . . Back at the hotel your mom is holding up her gift—Amethyst, she says admiring how light when passing through a prism bends. At his window that morning before we began my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift and descend, settling on roofs and cars. And I think of you and your wife and daughter: getting to see Madrid in white, your visit winding down, and how I had wanted that lesson to end to get to the park—Retiro, they say, is the city’s one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps cease when grass is completely covered as if walking on a cloud. The year before on a visit from the coast, a friend sitting at a window watched the flakes flutter and fall, dissolving before reaching the ground—aguanieve, he said while from a town near Seville B-52s were lifting off . . . I was in a trance that week though like most things the war in the Gulf was soon another backdrop, like the string of car bombs the following year. And yet that morning as soon as I heard, something led me not to the park but down to City Hall, workers in the street evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached the site—of course it was cordoned off, the spray of glass, the heap of twisted metal, and so later learned their names their lives. Of the five there was one: a postal clerk who as a boy, would plunge his hands into the white, the cold a sweet jolt whenever he got to touch the stuff, scooping it tightly into a ball like the ones he would dodge and throw years later at his wife-to-be: those weekends, those places—away from city air— a release . . . Miraflores, Siete Picos, Rascafría . . .It’s in his blood, she would come to say chatting with a neighbor about his thing for snow—the way it falls softly, blanketing roofs and groves, villages nestled in the Sierra’s hills: it is February and she is picturing him and the boy, up there now playing, horsing around

for Alan This, then, is the gift the world has given me (you have given me) softly the snow cupped in hollows lying on the surface of the pond matching my long white candles which stand at the window which will burn at dusk while the snow fills up our valley this hollow no friend will wander down no one arriving brown from Mexico from the sunfields of California, bearing pot they are scattered now, dead or silent or blasted to madness by the howling brightness of our once common vision and this gift of yours— white silence filling the contours of my life.

(January 7, 1915) In the dregs of the year, all steam and rain, In the timid time of the heart again, When indecision is bold and thorough, And action dreams of a dawn in vain, I saw high up over Bloxham vale The ploughshare tilt to the next long trail, And, spying a larder in every furrow, The wagtails crowd like a dancing hail! A second wonder there on the hill: Beneath the hedge, I saw with a thrill The budding primroses laugh good-morrow From a deep cradle rocked by a rill! Wagtail smart in his belted blue, Primrose paying her gold ere due,— (Out upon Winter! Down with Sorrow!) These are the things that I know are true.

Over the still world, a bird calls waking solitary among black boughs. You wanted to be born; I let you be born. When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure? Plunging ahead into the dark and light at the same time eager for sensation as though you were some new thing, wanting to express yourselves all brilliance, all vivacity never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you— you won't hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not the clear sound, only persistent echoing in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye— the one continuous line that binds us to each other.

Spiked sun. The Hudson’s Whittled down by ice. I hear the bone dice Of blown gravel clicking. Bone- pale, the recent snow Fastens like fur to the river. Standstill. We were leaving to deliver Christmas presents when the tire blew Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . . I want you.

When you wake up after twelve hours The stove is cold, there's ice in the water bucket — clouds outside and snow, the noise of a crow, The only sound; until your wife cries From an upper bunk, Honey, I'd like some coffee. Luther chuckles. I nod, excuse myself  for the men's room Next to me stretches a teacher Who once warned me not to get married Too early. Elderly now, but having done well In real estate as a second career. He says Well, well, as if  he can't recall my name. But buys me a drink and talks of  his wayward Daughter. When he mentions her married last name I tell him I have met her, but leave off at that    . . . He squints like a badger. In my wife's family, he resumes, After a jostling by a drunken salesman, there's a Sort of stupid gene that runs through the whole outfit, Being half  Finnish, half  Dutch — or maybe something Cancelled something    . . .    I notice a protuberance, a small growth At the edge of  his eye, hanging like a broken thread I always thought, I say, your daughter had a charming Personality. He hunches his shoulders. Waking to dread, The debts of  dread — but I couldn't help him. Neither did I want to. On the way out I spot my first wife chatting with a small-time gangster — She flutters a wave my way, a Victorian flutter