134 Winter poems

In my coat I sit At the window sill Wintering with snow That did not melt It fell long ago At night, by stealth I was where I am When the snow began

Lodged tight for days in a corner of the wall, ladybug can’t resist the tree, crawling now over cold light, ceramic fruits, tinsel lamb and sleigh. Flies out of the tree to try rum cake on a plate of caroling cherubs. Ends up on her back, wings flared, silly girl spinning over the kitchen floor. Later, between the blinds, tiny bump of silhouette: a stillness against the falling snow.

The backyard is one white sheet Where we read in the bird tracks The songs we hear. Delicate Sparrow, heavier cardinal, Filigree threads of chickadee. And wing patterns where one flew Low, then up and away, gone To the woods but calling out Clearly its bright epigrams. More snow promised for tonight. The postal van is stalled In the road again, the mail Will be late and any good news Will reach us by hand.

Winter advances leaving its white tracks bounding over the hills I climb each December to get to the river where velvety shrews, voles and squirrels crisscross in the snow, their claw marks reminding me of the exquisitely complicated pattern I watched an Ojibwe bite into a birchbark. (Art as old as the world, the woman said to me.) • In the origin myth of Eskimos the first children sprouted from fertile soil and, like tender plants, stayed rooted there, being nourished by the earth. No one knows how one boy and one girl grew into adults able to walk into the world, able to meet and marry. • Each tree was a letter once. Pagans spelled out their secrets by threading the proper leaves in proper order— Birch tree, Heather leaf, leaf of the Ash. A language you could hold in your hand. Words that quivered, turned color in the fall, that could be taken back, burned in regret. Lonely winters when there was nothing to say. • From a north window, the choked river, a slippery crack of light. Does my neighbor notice me crouched down, my bare fingers exploring the deer tracks I've found, some chips in the ice? I wave once, but she stares absentmindedly into the cold. Pure imitation. The great bored glacier of her face. • How many have known the endless emptiness inside an ordered room? How many, a silence so profound, inside and out? • I turn, startled, as if someone dogged my steps. Nothing. Midday sun scatters down among sapling ash. At my feet, birdtracks wherever I look. The only ciphers of the day. My footprints merge with the ones laid down here, my whole body, heart, lung, muscle, leaving its trace. • Everything that moves leaves a story. No story can exist by itself. • What am I to the wolf and the rabbit and the fox? To the songless birds balancing on branches? To the solitary pines dipped in frost? • First the trough where it plowed forward, then the wide belly-slide down the bank, the musty scent-post, the scat, the smooth hole where the otter slipped through a window in the ice. Scattered all around, a wolverine's fresh tracks, the slashes where its claws raked as it slid to a stop. Stiff gusts of wind kick up around me. Twigs and bits of debris soon mar the tracks. Before long, the sharp edges will begin to slump. By early next week, everything will be erased, the immaculate snow unable to keep the shape of a single creature.

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all And the air is emptied to an uplifting gassiness That turns lungs to winter waterwings, buoying, and the bright white night Freezes in sight a lapse of waves, balsamic, salty, unexpected: Hours after swimming, sitting thinking biting at a hangnail And the taste of the—to your eyes—invisible crystals irradiates the world “The sea is salt” “And so am I” “Don’t bite your nails” and the metal flavor of a nail—are these brads?— Taken with a slight spitting motion from between teeth and whanged into place (Boards and sawdust) and the nail set is ridged with cold Permanently as marble, always degrees cooler than the rooms of air it lies in Felt as you lay your cheek upon the counter on which sits a blue-banded cup A counter of condensed wintry exhalations glittering infinitesimally A promise, late on a broiling day in late September, of the cold kiss Of marble sheets to one who goes barefoot quickly in the snow and early Only so far as the ash can—bang, dump—and back and slams the door: Too cold to get up though at the edges of the blinds the sky Shows blue as flames that break on a red sea in which black coals float: Pebbles in a pocket embed the seam with grains of sand Which, as they will, have found their way into a pattern between foot and bedfoot “A place for everything and everything in its place” how wasteful, how wrong It seems when snow in fat, hand-stuffed flakes falls slow and steady in the sea “Now you see it, now you don’t” the waves growl as they grind ashore and roll out At your feet (in boots) a Christmas tree naked of needles Still wound with swags of tarnishing tinsel, faintly alarming as the thought Of damp electricity or sluggish lightning and for your health desiring pains The wind awards: Chapped Lips: on which to rub Time’s latest acquisition Tinned, dowel shaped and inappropriately flavored sheep wool fat A greasy sense-eclipsing fog “I can’t see Without my glasses” “You certainly can’t see with them all steamed up Like that. Pull over, park and wipe them off.” The thunder of a summer’s day Rolls down the shimmering blacktop and mowed grass juice thickens the air Like “Stir until it coats the spoon, remove from heat, let cool and chill” Like this, graying up for more snow, maybe, in which a small flock Of—sparrows?—small, anyway, dust-kitty-colored birds fly up On a dotted diagonal and there, ah, is the answer: Starlings, bullies of birdland, lousing up The pecking order, respecters of no rights (what bird is) unloved (oh?) Not so likeable as some: that’s temperate enough and the temperature Drops to rise to snowability of a softness even in its scent of roses Made of untinted butter frosting: Happy Name Day, Blue Jay, staggering On slow-up wings into the shrunk into itself from cold forsythia snarl And above these thoughts there waves another tangle but one parched with heat And not with cold although the heat is on because of cold settled all About as though, swimming under water, in clearly fishy water, you Inhaled and found one could and live and also found you altogether Did not like it, January, laid out on a bed of ice, disgorging February, shaped like a flounder, and March with her steel head pocketbook, And April, goofy and under-dressed and with a loud laugh, and May Who will of course be voted Miss Best Liked (she expects it), And June, with a toothpaste smile, fresh from her flea bath, and gross July, Flexing itself, and steamy August, with thighs and eyes to match, and September Diving into blue October, dour November, and deadly dull December which now And then with a surprised blank look produces from its hand the ace of trumps Or sets within the ice white hairline of a new moon the gibbous rest: Global, blue, Columbian, a blue dull definite and thin as the first day Of February when, in the steamed and freezing capital cash built Without a plan to be its own best monument its skyline set in stacks Like poker chips (signed “Autodidact”), at the crux of a view there crosses A flatcar-trailer piled with five of the cheaper sort of yachts, tarpaulined, Plus one youth in purple pants, a maid in her uniform and an “It’s not real Anything” Cossack hat and coat, a bus one-quarter full of strangers and The other familiar fixings of lengthening short days: “He’s outgrown them Before you can turn around” and see behind you the landscape of the past Where beached boats bask and terraced cliffs are hung with oranges Among dark star-gleaming leaves, and, descending the dizzying rough stairs Littered with goat turd beads—such packaging—you—he—she— One—someone—stops to break off a bit of myrtle and recite all the lines Of Goethe that come back, and those in French, “Connais-tu... ?” the air Fills with chalk dust from banged erasers, behind the February dunes Ice boats speed and among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream Where kids in kapok ice-skate and play at Secret City as the sun Sets before dinner, the snow on fields turns pink and under the hatched ice The water slides darkly and over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun In a chemical yellow greener than sulphur a flash of petroleum by-product Unbelievable, unwanted and as lovely as though someone you knew all your life Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes: the sky Flows with impersonal passion and loosening jet trails (eyes tearing from the cold) And on the beach, between foam frozen in a thick scalloped edging so like Weird cheek-mottling pillowcase embroidery, on the water-darkened sand the waves Keep free of frost, a gull strangles on a length of nylon fishline and the dog Trots proudly off, tail held high, to bury a future dinner among cut grass on a dune: The ice boats furl their sails and all pile into cars and go off to the super market Its inviting foods and cleansers sold under tunes with sealed in memory-flavor “Hot House Rhubarb” “White Rock Girl” “Citrus Futures” “Cheap Bitter Beans” and In its parking lot vast as the kiss to which is made the most complete surrender In a setting of leaves, backs of stores, a house on a rise admired for being Somewhat older than some others (prettier, too?) a man in a white apron embraces a car Briefly in the cold with his eyes as one might hug oneself for warmth for love —What a paint job, smooth as an eggplant; what a meaty chest, smooth as an eggplant —Is it too much to ask your car to understand you? the converse isn’t and the sky Maps out new roads so that, driving at right angles to the wind, clouds in ranks Contrive in diminishing perspective a part of a picture postcard of a painting Over oak scrub where a filling station has: gas, a locked toilet (to keep dirt in) A busted soda pop machine, no maps and “I couldn’t tell you thet” so The sky empties itself to a color, there, where yesterday’s puddle Offers its hospitality to people-trash and nature-trash in tans and silvers And black grit like that in corners of a room in this or that cheap dump Where the ceiling light burns night and day and we stare at or into each Other’s eyes in hope the other reads there what he reads: snow, wind Lifted; black water, slashed with white; and that which is, which is beyond Happiness or love or mixed with them or more than they or less, unchanging change, “Look,” the ocean said (it was tumbled, like our sheets), “look in my eyes”

A chair in snow should be like any other object whited & rounded and yet a chair in snow is always sad more than a bed more than a hat or house a chair is shaped for just one thing to hold a soul its quick and few bendable hours perhaps a king not to hold snow not to hold flowers

Winter is fallen early On the house of Stare; Birds in reverberating flocks Haunt its ancestral box; Bright are the plenteous berries In clusters in the air. Still is the fountain’s music, The dark pool icy still, Whereupon a small and sanguine sun Floats in a mirror on, Into a West of crimson, From a South of daffodil. ’Tis strange to see young children In such a wintry house; Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow Their tell-tale footprints go; Their laughter rings like timbrels ’Neath evening ominous: Their small and heightened faces Like wine-red winter buds; Their frolic bodies gentle as Flakes in the air that pass, Frail as the twirling petal From the briar of the woods. Above them silence lours, Still as an arctic sea; Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon Glitters; the crocus soon Will open grey and distracted On earth’s austerity: Thick mystery, wild peril, Law like an iron rod:— Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire, Each with his tiny fire Blown to a core of ardour By the awful breath of God.

By any measure, it was endless winter. Emulsions with Then circled the lake like This is it. This April will be Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose early, erased for an hour Silk-brush and ax I'd like to think I'm a different person latent image fading around the edges and ears Overall a tighter face now. Is it so hard for you to understand From the drop-down menu In a cluster of eight poems, I selected sleep, but could not I decided to change everything Composed entirely of stills or fade into the trees but could not remember the dream save for one brief shot of a woman opening her eyes Ari, pick up. I'm a different person In a perfect world, this would be April, or an associated concept Green to the touch several feet away

By any measure, it was endless winter. Emulsions with Then circled the lake like This is it. This April will be Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose early, erased for an hour Silk-brush and ax I'd like to think I'm a different person latent image fading around the edges and ears Overall a tighter face now. Is it so hard for you to understand From the drop-down menu In a cluster of eight poems, I selected sleep, but could not I decided to change everything Composed entirely of stills or fade into the trees but could not remember the dream save for one brief shot of a woman opening her eyes Ari, pick up. I'm a different person In a perfect world, this would be April, or an associated concept Green to the touch several feet away

The animal of winter is dying, its white body everywhere in collapse and stabbed at by straws of   light, a leaving to believe in as the air slowly fills with darkness and water drains from the tub where my daughter, watching it lower around her, feeling it go, says about the only thing she can as if it were a long- kept breath going with her blessing of dribble and fleck. Down it swirls a living drill vanishing toward a land where tomorrow already fixes its bright eye on a man muttering his way into a crowd, saying about the only thing he can before his body goes boom. And tomorrow, I will count more dark shapes tumbling from the sky, birds returning to scarcity, offering in their seesawing songs a kind of   liquidity.