The Night Itself
The shoulders of the evergreens
stoop beneath the weight
of winter weather and bear
the woes of the world. Indoors
the tulips writhe in their cut state.
I look out at snow, each
of the flickering flakes
a living thing that ever was
as they incline towards earth’s
impetus to goodness, despite its aches
and disappointments. Between
the bounty of hard won
retreat and the hardship
of a separation
from somewhere and someone
I was beside myself —
for we live in shadow,
scrabbling for that other thing,
the real. Whose shade is it?
That we might never know.
I’d favoured things
on a human scale,
the give and take of workers
with a crosscut saw,
the pitch fork, the square bale.
For there are times when time
itself is cruel — like that attack
at Flanders when a tank brigade
engaged with a battalion
on horseback
while their commander
posted from Front Lines
to the manager of his estates
concerns about the state
of crops and vines.
When my old friend
falters on a stair
or founders on a word or name
I see my fate, near or far—
who knows?— but there.
For at our time of day
the clock’s determined tick
reiterates and reinforces
loss
in its monosyllabic
march. Are they, the keys
to our lives, in the future
or the past, as we breathe in,
breathe out, to weather
a storm and find a suture,
as we track a passage back
from unbelief
and come on wayside trees
transformed by morning’s grace—
the bud, the leaf,
not to mention the bloom?
This season is a skeleton
to which Spring will cling. The threads
of dark adopt new twists and turns
until the night itself is spun.