134 Winter poems

It struck them both as strange: although each pond and lake clear to the coast was locked in ice, no open water, the imperious wind kept pushing waterfowl inland. That night a winter moon stood high and pierced the thin clouds’ vapors so the boy could contemplate their emptiness inside. Relentless, the flocks flew westward. The border collie whimpered, putting his forepaws now on one sill, now another, as if some odd creature circled the house. This lifetime later, a man, he looks back on that stay at her farm, its details clear, their meanings still vague. His grandmother called it wrong as well, that the weather should be so frigid even in such a gale. As a rule this kind of cold needed calm. He sees the fire, the dazzle of sparks when she loaded a log. What seemed most amiss was how the old woman’s house no longer felt safe that visit. He wanted and did not want to know what the dog might know. He tried to picture the menace outdoors. He longed to shape it so that he might name it. And after these many miles to now, away from the ruby glow of the metal parlor stove, from that blue-eyed collie, from the woman he so admires and loves recalling that night; after so much time, he still believes that to name a thing is to tame it, or at least to feel less bewildered. Not Death, for instance, but The deaths of Al and Virginia, his parents. Not the abstract legalism,Divorce, but The disappearance of my sweet wife Sarah, run off with that California lawyer. Not simply Alone, but I have no children. Was that the wail of geese coming down the stovepipe? If so, it would be a marvel, but he knew it wasn’t. The caterwaul from the barn was alarming, and more than it might have been had Grandma herself not startled— after which she put on her late large husband’s threaded farming coveralls outside her housedress, which rode up and made a lumpy sash. She stepped out under cloud and bird. He would not follow. Rather, he stood indoors to wait until she came stomping her boots through puddled barnyard holes like a child herself, kicking ice shards to scuttle along like beads from a broken bracelet. No matter. The world had gone wrong, violent and void at once. She said,The mare has foaled. On tiptoe, she read the mercury out the kitchen window, then told her shivering grandson,We’ll call the new colt Zero.

Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down — the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes — Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns and there — his solitary track stretched out upon the world.

Northern hemisphere it’s almost Christmas. Sunlight   withdrawing into its darkest shell of green coils ring by ring like a yellow snake in a tight burrow. The snake’s sleep maps an origin pinpoints the start of where morning lies — its polished skin a simple clock turning every so often leaving a scaled topography behind. But just as rain can fall sideways and eyes look aslant might a northern winter not widen light in the same way a snake exceeds its skin? Last summer I stood over a sheath of snake in the bush. The tail tapered the head was marked with the shape and angle of invisible eyes. It could have been a hairnet or a ghost but it was quieter than that. It could have been laid out across a plate of vine leaves. A seamstress could have used it as tulle a fisherman as netting the desert salt as cracks. Trees are empty on the sidewalk their fallen leaves layered and overlapping like shelves of ancient papyruses. One tree casts a long shadow two arms striking upwards as though piqued by pavement light. Between the shadow lying flat and still and the tree standing long and tall there is an angle of forty-five degrees. There is Icarus falling from blue to decimal to amber. The distance between north and south is mapped with the shape and angle of his eyes. The snake’s skin is colorless his eye invincible. The winter light is warm piercing darkness radiating a trajectory that points in all directions.

When ice outside makes daggers of the grass, I come to where the tides of life still flow. The water here still moves behind the glass. In here, the seasons never seem to pass— the sullen shark and rays still come and go. Outside the ice makes daggers of the grass and coats the roads. The meditative bass won't puzzle how the blustery blizzards blow. The water here still moves. Behind the glass, rose-tinted corals house a teeming mass of busy neon creatures who don't know "outside." The ice makes daggers of the grass and oily puddles into mirrors. Gas freezes in its lines; my car won't go, but water here still moves behind the glass. No piles of valentines, no heart held fast— just sea stars under lights kept soft and low. Outside, the ice makes daggers of the grass; in here, the water moves behind the glass.

Midwinter, the crows take their darkness out on day. A thin rain falls and breaks. I wonder at the way the oaks unravel here (and travel word of mouth) another year. Not going, I go south.

Wind whistling, as it does in winter, and I think nothing of it until it snaps a shutter off her bedroom window, spins it over the roof and down to crash on the deck in back, like something out of Oz. We look up, stunned—then glad to be safe and have a story, characters in a fable we only half-believe. Look, in my surprise I somehow split a wall, the last one in the house we’re making of gingerbread. We’ll have to improvise: prop the two halves forward like an open double door and with a tube of icing cement them to the floor. Five days until Christmas, and the house cannot be closed. When she peers into the cold interior we’ve exposed, she half-expects to find three magi in the manger, a mother and her child. She half-expects to read on tablets of gingerbread a line or two of Scripture, as she has every morning inside a dated shutter on her Advent calendar. She takes it from the mantel and coaxes one fingertip under the perforation, as if her future hinges on not tearing off the flap under which a thumbnail picture by Raphael or Giorgione, Hans Memling or David of apses, niches, archways, cradles a smaller scene of a mother and her child, of the lidded jewel-box of Mary’s downcast eyes. Flee into Egypt, cries the angel of the Lord to Joseph in a dream, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. While she works to tile the roof with shingled peppermints, I wash my sugared hands and step out to the deck to lug the shutter in, a page torn from a book still blank for the two of us, a mother and her child.

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face. It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere. Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle: Miraculous, the breathing plain. Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty— The squint itself consoled, at ease . . . The ten-fold forest almost the same . . . And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread. January 16, 1937

frost on the window fern patterns natural and exact the cold making art i didn't wipe it away until noon which made me late which was worth it

First snow fell last night quiet and accurate covered everything with the same blanket in the morning everything looked like it had been forgiven for something

February is when winter becomes unglamorous the novelty gone just the cold and the grey and the waiting but march comes it always comes february is just the price