Winter Poems

       Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing
       We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sun of corpse-flesh.

       The snow is deep on the ground.
       Always the light falls
       Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

       How like a winter hath my absence been
       From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

       I would like to decorate this silence,
       but my house grows only cleaner

       In winter
       all the singing is in
       the tops of the trees

       All the complicated details
       of the attiring and
       the disattiring are completed!

       Squinting through eye-slits in our balaclavas,
       we lurch across Washington Square Park

       The cold earth slept below;
       Above the cold sky shone;

       Suddenly, in every tree,
       an unseen nest
       where a mountain
       would be.

       Lips touching lips,
       did that break my horizon
       as much as those horses broke my belief?

       I leant upon a coppice gate
       When Frost was spectre-grey

       Whose woods these are I think I know.
       His house is in the village though;

       Snow:
       years of anger following
       hours that float idly down —

       In the warming house, children lace their skates,
       bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

       The night’s drifts
       Pile up below me and behind my back,

       The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
       And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass

       My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
       Toward heaven still,

       Winter. Time to eat fat
       and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

       As the stores close, a winter light
       opens air to iris blue,

       The first warm day,
       and by mid-afternoon
       the snow is no more
       than a washing
       strewn over the yards,