134 Winter poems

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r; When Phoebus gies a short-liv'd glow'r, Far south the lift, Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r, Or whirling drift: Ae night the storm the steeples rocked, Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked, While burns, wi' snawy wreeths upchoked, Wild-eddying swirl, Or thro' the mining outlet bocked, Down headlong hurl. List'ning, the doors an' winnocks rattle, I thought me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' winter war, And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scar. Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing! That, in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing An' close thy e'e? Ev'n you on murd'ring errands toil'd, Lone from your savage homes exil'd, The blood-stain'd roost, and sheep-cote spoil'd My heart forgets, While pityless the tempest wild Sore on you beats.

Boston snowbound, Logan closed, snowplows and salt-trucks flashing yellow, drifts tall as a man some places, visibility poor, I sit by the window and watch the snow blow sideways north-northeast, hot cup in hand, robe over pajamas. You have made me to seek refuge and charged me to care for my brothers. How cruel. That could be You out there howling, cracking the trees, burying everything. What could I possibly want from You that would not undo the whole world as it is?

A cold night crosses our path The world appears very large, very round now       extending far as the moon does It is from the moon this cold travels It is the light of the moon that causes this night reflecting distance in its own light so coldly (from one side of the earth to the other) It is the length of this coldness It is the long distance between two points which are not in a line        now not a straightness       (however straight) but a curve only, silver that is a rock reflecting not metal but a rock accepting distance (a scream in silence where between the two points what touches is a curve around the world (the dance unmoving). new york, 1969

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing, now you are uncurled and cover our eyes with the edge of winter sky leaning over us in icy stars. Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing, come with your seasons, your fullness, your end.

Across North Wales The snowflakes wander, A swarm of white bees. Over the woods A cold veil lies. A load of chalk Bows down the trees. No undergrowth Without its wool, No field unsheeted; No path is left Through any field; On every stump White flour is milled. Will someone tell me What angels lift Planks in the flour-loft Floor of heaven Shaking down dust? An angel’s cloak Is cold quicksilver. And here below The big drifts blow, Blow and billow Across the heather Like swollen bellies. The frozen foam Falls in fleeces. Out of my house I will not stir For any girl To have my coat Look like a miller’s Or stuck with feathers Of eider down. What a great fall Lies on my country! A wide wall, stretching One sea to the other, Greater and graver Than the sea’s graveyard. When will rain come?

Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument. There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the gray And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose And found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sun To do the shapely thing they had not done. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio. The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

From a ways, the sky and your hands come to my eyes, from some distant part of you; it’s snowing out, you’re all in the white of the snow every track in the candor a wound and the field beyond the window is a body a glance that becomes a pronouncement, the heat of breath, your head adrift in sleeplessness; that’s where it returns, in a word translated into silence where the sparrows tie loose knots your palms on your eyes, chest on your knees forehead in the snow. Translated from the Italian

for Francis and Barbara 1 Among the high-branching, leafless boughs Above the roof-peaks of the town, Snowflakes unnumberably come down. I watched out of the attic window The laced sway of family trees, Intricate genealogies Whose strict, reserved gentility, Trembling, impossible to bow, Received the appalling fall of snow. All during Sunday afternoon, Not storming, but befittingly, Out of a still, grey, devout sky, The snowflakes fell, until all shapes Went under, and thickening, drunken lines Cobwebbed the sleep of solemn pines. Up in the attic, among many things Inherited and out of style, I cried, then fell asleep awhile, Waking at night now, as the snow- flakes from darkness to darkness go Past yellow lights in the street below. 2 I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful. And like a child I cried myself to sleep High in the head of the house, feeling the hull Beneath me pitch and roll among the steep Mountains and valleys of the many years That brought me to tears. Down in the cellar, furnace and washing machine, Pump, fuse-box, water heater, work their hearts Out at my life, which narrowly runs between Them and this cemetery of spare parts For discontinued men, whose hats and canes Are my rich remains. And women, their portraits and wedding gowns Stacked in the corners, brooding in wooden trunks; And children’s rattles, books about lions and clowns; And headless, hanging dresses swayed like drunks Whenever a living footstep shakes the floor; I mention no more; But what I thought today, that made me cry, Is this, that we live in two kinds of thing: The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky Their black patience, are one, and that branching Relation teaches how we endure and grow; The other is the snow, Falling in a white chaos from the sky, As many as the sands of all the seas, As all the men who died or who will die, As stars in heaven, as leaves of all the trees; As Abraham was promised of his seed; Generations bleed, Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

This inwardness, this ice, this wide boreal whiteness into which he's come with a crawling sort of care for the sky's severer blue, the edge on the air, trusting his own lightness and the feel as feeling goes; this discipline, this glaze, this cold opacity of days begins to crack. No marks, not one scar, no sign of where they are, these weaknesses rumoring through, growing loud if he stays, louder if he turns back. Nothing to do but move. Nowhere to go but on, to creep, and breathe, and learn a blue beyond belief, an air too sharp to pause, this distance, this burn, this element of flaws that winces as it gives. Nothing to do but live. Nowhere to be but gone.

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck, out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand. Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water, but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack. The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot, strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog, fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.