I
The fallen snow pales to blue as the sun
Burrows beneath the bear-rug of winter
Now draped across the hills – these woods, profiled
And barren, twist and pinch exhausted rays
Through a tined labyrinth of tiny branch work.
II
The deadened light disturbs the scheme we call
The world – and December’s candid blanket
Becomes a fazed sheet of gunmetal –
The twilight glows a pallid negative
And our own capabilities come to doubt:
“We live as if our hunger were a sin
Because our sins are hunger without end.”
I set the blaze, imagine the last,
And know the sun has lost its place in time
Though calendar and clock endure the cold.
“If man were ever meant to love, it would be
Not in some future time, nor in the past;
The heart is made for the present tense alone.”
Clocks don’t say that; snow and shadows do,
And we respond as silence does, “Amen.”
III
This fire’s angles are all wrong, although
Its heat rejuvenates this house of bones…
So many windows is too much to see –
Why did we wait until the first snow fall
To bless ourselves?
and there are doors yet to close
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