134 Winter poems

When men were all asleep the snow came flying, In large white flakes falling on the city brown, Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town; Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing; Lazily and incessantly floating down and down: Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing; Hiding difference, making unevenness even, Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing. All night it fell, and when full inches seven It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven; And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare: The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness; The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air; No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling, And the busy morning cries came thin and spare. Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling, They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing; Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees; Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder, ‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’ With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder, Following along the white deserted way, A country company long dispersed asunder: When now already the sun, in pale display Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day. For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow; And trains of sombre men, past tale of number, Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go: But even for them awhile no cares encumber Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken, The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

Ice, entire cakes of it. Crows feed on sand. So poor is this season the ground steals color from the tree-shadows. • Can it be that nothing is as far as here? Just look! How much past we have to cover this evening– • Come to think of it don't forget to pick off this self and that self along the way. Though that’s not right– you spit them out like pits. • If there is a partition between the outer and inner worlds, how is it that some water in me churns between the mountain ranges? How is it we are absorbed so easily by the ground— • Long nights for simple words. • Slant rhyme of current thinking and past thinking. A chewed over hour, late. Where the long ago past and the future come to settle scores. • Traveling and traveling, but so much interior unpicked over by the eyes. • Nothing is as far as here.

Dumped wet and momentary on a dull ground that’s been clear but clearly sleeping, for days. Last snow melts as it falls, piles up slush, runs in first light making a music in the streets we wish we could keep. Last snow. That’s what we’ll think for weeks to come. Close sun sets up a glare that smarts like a good cry. We could head north and north and never let this season go. Stubborn beast, the body reads the past in the change of light, knows the blow of grief in the time of trees’ tight-fisted leaves. Stubborn calendar of bone. Last snow. Now it must always be so.

Cold for so long, unable to speak, yet your mouth seems framed on a cry, or a stifled question. Who placed you here, and left you to this lonely eternity of ash and ice, and himself returned to the dust fields, the church and the temple? Was it God—the sun-god of the Incas, the imperial god of the Spaniards? Or only the priests of that god, self-elected—voice of the volcano that speaks once in a hundred years. And I wonder, with your image before me, what life might you have lived, had you lived at all—whose companion, whose love? To be perhaps no more than a slave of that earthly master: a jug of water on your shoulder, year after stunted year, a bundle of reeds and corn, kindling for a fire on whose buried hearth? There were furies to be fed, then as now: blood to fatten the sun, a heart for the lightning to strike. And now the furies walk the streets, a swarm in the milling crowd. They stand to the podium, speak of their coming ascension ... Through all this drift and clamor you have survived—in this cramped and haunted effigy, another entry on the historian’s dated page. Under the weight of this mountain— once a god, now only restless stone, we find your interrupted life, placed here among the trilobites and shells, so late unearthed.

One cuts blocks From the abundant river, Hauls them house to house. One falls, unseen, The heart Inoculated cold Against a sky still moving. Moving even now Above the river, The canal. Willows shimmering Across the water, Muskrats diving out of reach. The river whispers Till it freezes— A body Twirling sluggishly Beneath the surface as again One stack, then Spreads the straw. Another falters, Slips, or Puts a sliver on your tongue To feel it melting there— The ice-lit Underworld Of someone else.

Then all one day because of ice they couldn't make it down the hill. Or up, James says, dabbing at a spill of coffee, crunching toast as if it had a spine. But he could work, at any rate, could concentrate on that book he's been reading, or meaning to, the flu— or was it famine?—of '49, some smoldering fact he's found in the cold ash of some war. Gusting upward, lobes and nose on fire, his whole face florid from the heart attack he's somehow never had, he sways, repeating: Oh, we'd get down just fine, I expect, but we'd never make it back, then goes into his room and shuts the door. Eva's hours have nearer ends. She heats the little disk the cat sleeps on; chips, until her hands are gone, the glaze off all the feeders for the birds; then writes two friends to thank them for the birthday chocolates they've sent. The word alone makes her stomach burn. Which is mostly what age is, she's learned, the senses sharpening backwards, keen to what they can't perceive, when to be wise means mostly not to wish for what you love, for what you love is pain: spices or coffee, gin bringing the evening light into your veins, good chocolates the grandkids ravish like a horde of crows. You stuff your bellies with tomorrow's ache, she can almost hear him bellow, nipping and pinching to make them squeal. Hot water with honey, one coddled egg, dry saltines: Oh, what difference does it make? She picks up the chocolates, breaks the seal. • He draws the blinds on a wall of glass, winces at the glare, drags his chair into the bright crevasse between his bed and bookshelf, takes a deep breath of air, and buries himself in one of the early wordy furies of William Gladstone, never a man for minor keys. Creak and tick of the burdened limbs. A creak and tick inside of him as he crosses his legs and then uncrosses them, shifts his weight to ease the stiffness in one side, turns a page like a summit he has climbed, and breathes... Think of it—twenty thousand books devoured in Gladstone's life, and of his own enough to keep an army of bibliographers occupied; a whole age and empire crammed into one man: spellbinding crowds until he couldn't stand, felling his million trees, filling six decades' worth of diaries because a life is owed as well as owned, time a gift of which a good man gives account; who would mount, night after night, a moral, high-rhetorical siege upon some poor Haymarket tart in whom ruin and beauty were one word, then go home and whip himself for a sin that, all the evidence suggests, never occurred but in his heart. • And has just one, pleasure spreading through her blood like a single drop of ink. She scours the stove and countertop, bleaches coffee stains off the sink, cleans leaf by leaf the emerald ripple and the paradise palm, both mostly dormant now, reaches high for the philodendron, huge since trained to climb, and pauses, remembering the calm of constant motion that her mother was— a beauty, men said, though it hardly seemed a part of her, looking out of her own face like someone on a train; and remembering, too, the child-high hedgerows alone the lane behind their house on Paddox Close, the slice of sky above growing wider as she grew, the little park with its central statue (who was it of?), which, last time she'd seen, weather had worried to a Swedish ivy sort of green. • Emma Clifton, Elizabeth Collins, P. Lightfoot— even the names of those women are there amid the parliamentary proceedings, bulldog scholarship, affairs of state. He lifts his hand like a weight to check his watch, little trembles traveling through his bones into the air as through plucked strings a sound. Two hours until the final round at Palm Springs, with its hairpin fairways, lacquered greens, and that great eighteenth in homage to Bobby Jones. What a character!—touring in his teens, retired at twenty-eight with nothing left to win, at forty storming Normandy with men half his age. Even his death was rare— syringomyelia—cane to brace to wheelchair without a trace of self-pity, regret, rage: We all have to play the ball as it lies. How much of a man's revealed in how he dies... Poor Owen, barely sixty, Dean of the College, a decent book on Kant behind him: two days of chest pain slivering into a lifetime's knowledge and all the old beliefs come flooding back, silly relics and rituals, griefs you're born into, some guilt you can't even name. "Ischemia," that's exactly right: blood lack. • Sweet pickles and white bread, salted ham, a soybean spread that is his one concession to his heart, two butter cookies, plum jam: she clicks across the polished floor through motes that rise and float like molecules of light, pausing outside his door, hearing the Mahler chorus to which he always cries, plays to cry, she suspects, as if even sadness could be planned. She takes the knob in her hand, sees, inside its shine, white tablecloths, crystal cut fine as jewels, and, and... and a man with American shoulders and vowels, that face so open it wasn't, like the ocean, and that tidal way he had of filling any space that wasn't taken, the table where she sat with friends, afternoons and weekends, classrooms, boardrooms, lecture halls, the very bodies of their children, in whose broad limbs he seems to sprawl. Was that what she had fallen for, talk of golf, and Oxford, and roast beef in that gray decade after the war, that it seemed so safe a fall? • There—where the strings go silent and that woman's whole soul is in her throat... Ahome can have but one composer. Wasn't that the quote? That long ironclad letter Mahler wrote to Alma, the most exquisite woman in Vienna, who packed away that cold contract, her party dresses, and her own precocious technique, and settled, if you could call it that, into the role of being Gustav Mahler's wife: I am not happy, and yet not unhappy. My ship is in the harbor, but it has sprung a leak. But he loved her; and she is in his music as surely as the God he never quite possessed nor fully lost, as surely as the daughter is alive inside this song, whose life it cost. Gladstone also had a daughter die at five. Odd, not to have thought of that before. And Mahler's sisters name was Anna, and Gladstone's sister Ann; and wasn't Mrs. Gladstone's family from Oxford, or near? Oh, William dear, she told him once,if you weren't such a great man,you'd be a terrible bore. • Was that a laugh or a sob? Mahler dies off into the long silences, polite applause, and weirdly reverential tones of golf. This could take all day. She lets go of the knob, backs away. • He looks up as if he's heard a sound— what was it called, that late-medieval game out of which golf evolved? He looks down: O'Connor's on the second tee, It must have started earlier than he thought, Steady head, steady head, that pro at Sea Pines always said. James lifts one hand above his knee, so palsied now he can't keep his cocktails quiet, as if every instant were a shock his body took. Think of a stake driven through your skull into the ground.

Outside the igloo he waited for an invitation to come inside. There was no knocker, no doorbell. He coughed, there was no reply. He crouched down and peered in. He felt the warm air from a fire pat his cheeks and ruffle his hair. Hello he said quietly and repeated it. The frost in his toes urged him in, so did the pain in his gut. His knees one by one welcomed the snow and brought him into the warmth. He stood up and breathed deeply. He held a foot up to the flames then swapped it for the other foot. He lay down on the polar bear rug but a smell yanked him upright again and led him to a dresser of  bone where a bowl sat with a cover on it. He lifted this to reveal dried meat. He grabbed a chunk and tore at it with his teeth. It was reindeer. He devoured all that was in the bowl and went looking for some more. He found none, but there was a bottle of firewater which he swigged. He swigged again and left it down. He lay on the bearskin and fell asleep.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ. Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day, Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay; Enough for Him, whom angels fall before, The ox and ass and camel which adore. Angels and archangels may have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air; But His mother only, in her maiden bliss, Worshipped the beloved with a kiss. What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part; Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

We came so trustingly, for love, but these Lowlands, flatlands, near beneath the sea Point with their cautionary bones of sand To exorcize, submerge us; we stay free Only as mermaids glittering in the waves: Mermaids of the imagination, young A spring ago, who know our loveliness Banished, like fireflies at winter’s breath, Because none saw; these vines about our necks We placed in welcome once, but now as wreath Against the scalpel cold; still cold creeps in To grow like ivy over our chilling bodies Into our blood. Now in our diamond dress We wive only the sequins of the sea. The lowlands have rejected us. They lie Athwart the whispering waters like a scar On a mirage of glass; the dooming land, Where nothing can take root but frost, has won. And what of warmth and what of joy? They are Sequestered elsewhere, southward, where the sun Speaks. For all our mermaid vigilance And balance, all goes under; underneath The land’s gray wave we falter and fall back To hibernate within the caves of death.

"The younger brother roasted a breast of Pishiboro's elephant wife and handed Pishiboro some, which he presently ate. Then the younger brother said in a voice full of scorn. 'Oh you fool. You lazy man. You were married to meat and you thought it was a wife.'" FROM A MYTH OF THE BUSHMEN Poised upside down on its duncecap, a shrunken purple head, True Blueberry, enters its tightening frame of orange lip, and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with Zanzibar Cocoa, while Here at the Martha Washington Ice Cream Store we outdo the Symbolistes. a fine green trickle— Pistachio? Mint Julep? Words have colors, and colors are tasty. sweetens his chin. In front of me Licorice teeters like a lump of coal on its pinkish base of Pumpkin. A Rauschenberg tongue fondles this rich donnée , then begins to erase it. Turning from all that is present in the flesh, so to speak, let the eye wander off to a menu, where it can start to ingest “Quite Sour Lemon sherbet topped with a stem cherry and chocolate sprinkles Swilling in language, all floating in bubbly cherry phosphate the bloated imagination is urged to open still wider and shovel it in, and served with a twist of pretzel.” In this world “Creamy Vanilla and Smooth Swiss Chocolate ice creams” can be “blended with chopped pineapple, dark fudge sauce, ripe bananas, whipped topping, cookies, roasted nutmeats and nippy chopped cherries.” the Unconscious, that old hog, being in charge here of the creative act. At about the moment my tastebuds receive a last tickle of Gingersnap and begin to respond to Orange Fudge, I look at you who have bought my ice cream cones for twenty years, Moving another new ice to the mouth we needn’t remember and look away it is always the same mouth that melts it. My mind assembles a ribald tower of sherbet dips, all on one cone, Apricot, Apple, Tangerine, Peach, Prune, Lime, and then it topples. You are steadier than I. You order one dip always, or, in a dish, two dips of the same flavor. In this hysterical brilliance of neon Come on, consumers, we’ve got to keep scooping it is twelve or fifteen of us to thirty ice creams. so that the creams shall not rise like cold lava out of their bins, numbing our feet, our knees, freezing our chests, our chins, our eyes, Open the door, quick, and let in two handholding adolescents. Coping with all those glands makes them good and hungry. so that, flying out of their cannisters, the chopped nuts shall not top off our Technicolor grave with their oily ashes. Listen! All around us toothsome cones are suffering demolition down to the last, nipple-like tip. How do we know where to stop? Perhaps the glasses and dishes are moulded of candy, and the counters and windows… Over your half-eaten serving of Italian Delight, why are you looking at me the way you are looking at me?