134 Winter poems

Dark frost was in the air without, The dusk was still with cold and gloom, When less than even a shadow came And stood within the room. But of the three around the fire, None turned a questioning head to look, Still read a clear voice, on and on, Still stooped they o’er their book. The children watched their mother’s eyes Moving on softly line to line; It seemed to listen too—that shade, Yet made no outward sign. The fire-flames crooned a tiny song, No cold wind stirred the wintry tree; The children both in Faërie dreamed Beside their mother’s knee. And nearer yet that spirit drew Above that heedless one, intent Only on what the simple words Of her small story meant. No voiceless sorrow grieved her mind, No memory her bosom stirred, Nor dreamed she, as she read to two, ’Twas surely three who heard. Yet when, the story done, she smiled From face to face, serene and clear, A love, half dread, sprang up, as she Leaned close and drew them near.

Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again and given her to the lake to wear as a skin. Why am I always being the weather? There were days in the winter when her smile was so lovely I felt the breathing of my own goodness, though it remained fetal and separate. I was a scavenger who survives with a sling and stones, but whose god nonetheless invents the first small bright bird. And it was like flight to bring food to her lips with a skeletal hand. But now she will always be naked and sad. She will be what happens to lake water that is loved and is also shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing, the black blood of it, the chest opened to reveal the inevitable heart attack. God, the silence of the chamber we watch from. What happens to water that isn’t loved? It undergoes processes. It freezes beside traffic. But the reaching out to all sides at once, the wet closing of what was open? That is a beautiful woman. So of course I stand and stare, never able to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.

The reservoir churned and cloud-deformed The far line of hills, fused, bunched color bitter wind against this hunch my folded bones I can see the rust earth beneath trees, the rough mats gathering weight in semi-darkness, dim nesting bases of trees Graft of dark cloud upon lighter one behind, building up of something, a thickening, deposit of cold air, dark web of insistence, built up in me How long can it be here? A simmering of trees, a dark moiling a winter weight a mid-shimmering of heat-distorted things The positioning of bolts of deep orange, gold-green and amber molded, wicked in together Drops in pressure, now, a field of cold, a shift between rain and snow The movement into this remembering of separate things, train sounding its horn, removing itself from the scene Snow thickening the far bars of trees, graying them in Blotting, dulling, gauzing over this dream It is snowfalling, it is beauty-filling and cleansing this burn of words it is delivering something seeming to uplift and to begin pressing downward, this ink into frozen droplet this thing Snow plinking in the leaves, the left hands of trees the neat levers and pulls the odd weeds The rich fringe of emptying trees the shifted pins the breaks into dense pines into period reeds into gutterings What happens to the opposite shore is untenable is unmanageable to me That stratagem of damage, that unmattering Believe me it is some abomination of things being killed and that mattering to me That exquisite built thing that is obliterated its tiny white amplitude, its singing crushed into particles, its must on the undersides of leaves Now I am sure the world has not unfolded before me anymore but has closed into rows of its foldings Something in the collections of those trees bare branches upthrust, the brush of them bare branches up-brushed their lip along mesh of shore weeds, the flanged grasses the scrim of their midst I am in them again meddling in darks that are in them and the white gold that is their outermost screen that is their leafleting their grief that is in me thin dredge of pebbles and strange glandular patternings of trees against trees against cut-bank against breath The rubied lung of sumac tragedian

chains of the willow, desolate weft birds and the slim reprieves the socketing together of weeds before water straight-pins of jet incontrovertible smears of dense cloud against bullet-train whitenings, unleashed the reductions to tense the awful dozes into deep sinks flush grows upward, secreting, soaking through the old damasks fretwork of trees, their balances achieved then slipped off touched-up surge of cloud across water The river shuttles onward, reconstituting It gains the red threads of taillights the spare greens and the thousand paired whites warping over, shaping off The ducks come forth out of something unclear The trees drain their weights into water The ducks are a tension I have not known of How they pivot, disfiguring the whole field dragging their trapezoid blear They are careful and meet their trains behind them like brides Now the whistles of those taken to air The disturbance of them in this river and the wavering cardiographies up-rushed, up-stayed This is the push of all strayed things into night the heavying of trees against sky-fire stolen into a river, cloistered down I do not want anything more than this taking of last light into pocketings and loose garments unbearable closets of the trees the stitched-in bones and the placketings This feeling of everything unhanded suddenly let go into robes The half-bustled willow rails forward The still surface. The quieted surface. The same sharp planets exacting there

Barely discerned clouds Hard, hard to get here what worth, what worth River of steel. River of no one becoming you. Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their strangeness The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness The few elms dismembering The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes and its filters It is lost to the surface of this river The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface resisting, unetchable Now the faint rain. I don’t know what to do with all this waiting things getting themselves readied toward emptiness The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its exfoliating, its rivening its being disfigured by fortune and by wind A crone with old frills at her hair The grasp of her toward me

clouds in rafts above, upon one another, pushed up along the margin of sky dark underbellies Shirring of grasses and the nearly empty apple tree behind Where is this beginning from? The roll of clouds bolsters up close moves vaguely east Hear the interstate, its rush of backdrop constant Oh those deep colors are something sacred There are patches of olive green, chartreuse, umber, piled against each other, snapping and smoking almost and then the empty prongs and systems cross-hatchings against the grays, burnished and glowing The cloud roll has changed now, been buffeted slowly into bunches, disorganizing Oh, these torches before me that seem to burn brighter as the light fades This aching gradation, smear and gleam-forth and then the bare black hands up through splaying and forcing the crowns so slightly, just a tender worrying up from inside the swollen gloves, the spheres of them, the undoing the serial falling-off Furious brocade, yes, devastation That one oak in its torque and above, against the maddening subtle surface of the sky the barely defined roads upon it, the passages the growings-forth gobbed and wrought, rich impasto stubborn, unbecoming Now the grays, almost purple, seem to move forward branching up from out of the background darkening forth surge from within the mass organisms coming up against each other, bulging and turning off, roiling slow and mesmeric the contained motion of it rooted static movement, within stasis painstaking damage then recovery, damage then recovery A lighter band of sky now, stratum between dark cloud and complicated span of tree-frieze layering, up-changing free-needled, built-up duns and copperings score and rose-green gore, stitch and fret always upon the under-thing, the broad backing up over the one

The shelter of it carved, caved Across the river, the park and the little Ferris wheel closed down The great oaks emptying, russet, gusseted the hovering slant light leaking from the outer edge of cloud bed leads and shawls pulled forth Thy synchrony of the lost elements recovered the shivering water surfaces, planar unmeldings, remeldings, riverine alchemies, unlocketed selves now the reemergence, the sun pouring global gold uptilted, gobleted, incanted Am I not as God made me but stranger? Made stranger still by what I have seen at this hour of earth untended, unministered— light caught up in the river’s grooved tread That sun more like a mass grope out of emptiness and the black river weeds before it, torn and trained, rocketed and stark and stuck-to The tall shadow of the willow grows forth And the spare stems of the grasses and the rods of the mullein And these are the stations of this river The houses and the boats and the parked cars The growing wedge the ducks make moving forward, the shape of the element there among the weeds that jut forward, the mass of the willows growing deeper in green and sundering The backfall of sun going downward The surface of the river coming clear of its own admixture The ducks moving over like slow planes in formation, barely seen needles hauling white threads, secretly heeding The fish in my skin relinquishes Will I know then what I have become? The river darkens from its end of trees closing in There is the sun and this deep depression Exiting as viewed in this river

stripped batting of cloud glimpsed ligaments dusk coming up under lithographic, nib-hatchings instruments click the fine-sprung locust replicate dinge along hill-lines tailings of umber, the rust smudge There is still that hemmed ocean of oaks the various reds, the somehow silver cast over the brown-gold the under-brushed shadows How can there be more of their dispensing into air? The night-openings of the trees The thousand clefts into Their corridors shiver and merge and piece apart There is no one beside what was once river Only the carbons incoming accreting in leaves Love of old oaks unencumbering Root-beauties brought through crude sieves of bare trees the few fastened leaves Those pods are like tongues or like sickles The blades have been pulled from their sheaths The backs of the clouds now upturned They herd from pink seas They make their untouchable stream through regions of steep emptiness against which the trees have their gestures Drop down, drop down toward me your little sleek scars Make your bed in rough cedars clangor of darks numbering in clusters of trunks and spoked lungs the thistles that work at the gums

slant hand of beech leaves shag of oaks before water When did you go missing from me? That passage between limb and slipped skin gouged hickories, the ermine-bright birch through all that is traveling slopeward circleting leaf through branch weave corymbs of curled leaves lone cedar document rising Through trees that far land moves descant the old rusts and pastes undershined Don’t you ever think this is so strange? the sibilant drift of dried leaves the coming down all to some shambles the encroachments on the innermost things Don’t you feel how everything is strained beyond certain remembering? The limbs break their fragile whisks into The sky is a shroud pulled up over Each leaf of the beech has its wisdom held fast its little death ship I cannot wake up from inside this burrow into fundaments of leaves The cold drills down into the stone the almost-extracted green the bird cloaked up under the ribs the dull gleams

a mass of moth-eaten cloud threadbare and spun across a bullish moon an animal wakes when I walk in winter, wrapped against a withering wind, solitary, on a Solway flat winter migrants gather in long black lines along a silver sleek heads held back, throats thrust toward an onshore rush occasionally cruciform, static in a flying wind as though in obeisance to the sea retracing steps washed out by whimpering silt each tide a season in the pecking mall they call as I approach, an upright spelk on their shelf, gathering my notes and theirs we scavenge ahead of our shadows waiting for what the tide brings in or leaves out purple, hedged cloud edged gold hung on silver slates of sand diverted leaps of light surrender water risen from rivulets roughed from rage repealing waves repeat a curlew’s estuary echo who, but you and the wind’s wake?