Four women sit at a table on a cold night and laugh at the thing that will eventually swallow them. That is the nerve of "A Cold Night," a poem that opens on the wide landscape of a whole life, narrows to one table, and then widens again into parting words that are part blessing, part warning.
The first stanza sums up experience in terms of travel: "paths in all directions, / doors of many houses," mountains, forests, deserts that were "no strangers to our feet." The verbs are in the past, and the tone is that of people who have already done the walking. The second stanza turns to another old image, the cycle of work and harvest. "We had scattered, / and gathered into baskets, / and emptied them / more than once." The last phrase is dry understatement, a way of saying a great deal about a long life in four words. Then the poem goes bare: "It was a cold night, / a waning gibbous moon, / no music anywhere." The moon is precisely described and just past full, already shrinking. The poem never says so, but it is easy to read that shrinking as a comment on the speakers' stage of life.
The four at the table are not given names but titles: Beekeeper, One-Breasted Woman, Poet, Old Maid. The capitals make them feel like figures from a fairy tale or a deck of cards. Each is defined by a trade, a body, or a label that society might use to diminish her. The poem doesn't explain the One-Breasted Woman, so the reader must infer a body marked by loss. Old Maid is an insult that the group seems to wear without flinching. Together they laugh "and laughed / in the teeth of the darkness, / into the mouth of the Beast." The idiom "in the teeth of" means defiance, but here it turns literal. Darkness grows jaws, and the women sit right at the opening of them.
What they say next echoes Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolf in the grandmother's bed has big ears and big eyes. The women turn the tale into a joke: "there's no room / for Granny in there now. / Her ears are too big, / her eyes are too big, her elbows / are sharp as her tongue." In the story Granny is swallowed. Here she is too awkward, too angular, too sharp to fit. The joke is self-mockery that doubles as armor, because the traits that make an old woman seem grotesque are the ones that make her indigestible. The poem never says whether Granny is one of the four or a figure they share. Nor does it say what the Beast is. Death, illness and age are all possible, and the vagueness lets each reader supply their own.
The ending is quieter. "The wine was gone, / the moon was setting," and two supplies drain away together. The farewell is a set of instructions: "Keep your eyes open… take care of your heart… keep / an ear to the tears in the ground." Notice the body parts. Eyes and ears are the same features that were just ridiculed as "too big." The advice quietly reverses the joke, since watchfulness and listening are what survival requires. "Tears in the ground" is deliberately double. It can mean weeping, or rips and fissures in the earth. Either way the women are telling each other to listen low, to what is buried or breaking, and the poem stops there without offering comfort.
The form suits this tone. It is free verse with no rhyme, in short stanzas of uneven length that read like speech. Line breaks do small, sly work: "her elbows" hangs at the end of a line before the sharpness arrives in the next. Repetition provides the music the night lacks, in "laughed and laughed," in the doubled "too big," and in the recurring "we said." The speaker is always "we," never "I," so the poem's courage belongs to the group.
That is where its significance lies. It takes a story in which the old woman is prey and hands the telling to old women, who joke, drink, and send one another off with sharp instructions. Its bravery comes from company and comedy rather than solemnity, and it leaves the Beast unnamed, so the laughter, not the monster, is what stays with the reader.