Three Winter Poems

WINTER DAWN

In first wintry morning light

The window sill peeling paint

Has grown a beard of ice

Overnight. Glacial darkness

Now is luminous chill. Wan

Beams bounce about, silent.

Walls, doors, bed, and sofa

Glow like the full moon.

Hidden behind the horizon, a lantern

Reddens the sky, blue and gray.

Winsome, time turns, smiles

For the photographer, who

Traps the moment in amber

As eternity enters the room.

THREE MILES SOUTH OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

When Ragnarok comes, it will be bleakest winter. Snowstorms will pour forth incessantly, clotty ash engulfing the air. The sun will evaporate, the moon and stars join permanently with darkness. Rivers, lakes, oceans—vast expanses—will densify into sludge. Hills, trees, the entire land will disappear beneath rising snowy heaps. Wild animals, bony, starving, will wander about the whiteness. Domestic animals will perish from bitterest cold and neglect. Shuddering, everyone still alive will wrap themselves inside fireless caves.

When the world ends, it will all take place at the epicenter of all wretchedness, nexus of all misery, and seat of all gloom…three miles south of the Canadian border.

WINTER SOLSTICE

December 21, 1989

I am prisoner to conversation with an old man with a broken nose, mute with catarrh, sedentary and limping.

The window is squealing like a small animal, trapped.

Outside in the empty parking lot sits an abandoned car, dried out extinct turtle.

Dryness scrapes skin off the flaking season lying lifeless, electricity gone dead.

Clouds cast to the ground the feeble eyes of a pallid man.

Trees written in charcoal thrust into the sky, exclaiming, “I am turned into a pillar of salt!”

Winter breaks its stony face against the hammering wind,

Dust and rocks mix with air,

Grass grinds like pebbles underfoot.

A warm room withers faster than a disconnected leaf.

Memories scatter, twigs across the carpet.

Deaf to clapping, hooded thoughts wander.

Only blue sparks crackle in recognition.