Twenty
Between us,
some three hundred
miles of ice? —
It's not so much.
Poems on the topic: winter
Poems on the topic “winter” on Poets.by.
February
The frost under our feet
doesn’t cough that loudly,
yet it sounds more like
an old man’s mumbling.
The wind is not breathing
fast and chilly like last month.
Undressed trees
do not look that pretty
yet they seem shy, hiding within
thousands of pregnant buds.
It’s February,
the daylight
has emerged victorious
from its great battle
against dark.
I Don't Know What to Title This
What else could you possibly offer me
But your very flesh?
Or do you wish I would dwell in the ruins of your soul,
To take refuge there, like a Barbarian
From the siege of Rome’s legions?
Fifty years, a feast of shattered bulbs
Among festoons of crimson crepe paper
Faded by time
Like debris strewn about the shore.
What else could you give to the one who had been your master
but your very flesh?
This, no matter how much you always
Denied me not the greetings
Of those who open their lives to summer,
But the farewell of hostile winter.
May God take his holiday,
January Solitaire
Lay out a patience
(Winter has come down.)
Watch logs in a fireplace
disarrange into orange dice.
(Next year regulations
will prohibit burning wood.)
“Try again, Sir Tommy.”
(Desperation is one parent
of whimsy. The other is unknown.)
Best not to count the times
you look out on the gray and sigh.
(“Quantitative judgments do not apply.”)
North San Juan
There’s no South or West or
East San Juan, only
North San Juan, alone with its
name, cut in half
by a highway. Once miners
loved it, then Hippies, now
no one special. It’s a place
boozers who like to stop
at every place stop. Its
graveyard is enormous,
with regal vestiges—tall
tombstones, wealthy oaks. In
summer-swelter, flies stick
to diesel oil. Sloppy
screened-doors flop
in breezes. Sadness
Sierra Nevada: Cold Work Moment
In a sense it’s always winter
in this wooded county of our psyche,
where my father and I build a house,
the rest of the crew off drunk somewhere.
The contractor has taken blueprints
and a cash advance to Reno.
A white sky pays out
kernels of snow. My father saws.
I nail. Partitions take ghostly shape.
In the forest of our days, coyotes
eat bread crumbs we scattered
to find our way back to where we left for work.
We lift walls into iron wind,
and brace. Ropes of snot come out
of our noses. Sierra cold’s meticulous.
It polishes our eyeballs like a monocled jeweler.
To a Passenger in Mainz
There’s the experience
of being the last one left
on a railway platform.
The desired train wails
away toward a city that
was not expecting you.
You feel a mixture of regret
and satisfaction as you retreat
with your ticket and luggage.
A taxicab takes you
back to the apartment.
You don’t unpack.
You're not going anywhere.
There's the experience of not
going anywhere. There’s a
mental exercise of wondering why
Murargatan: Uppsala, Sweden
Maja used to say,
“Thank you for today.”
From her I learned
everyone’s old and
young at once.
At night in snow
near Maja’s bus-stop
on Maja’s basic street—
Murargatan means
street of bricks—wild
rabbits sometimes paused
like caesuras in Swedish
conversation. I waited.
I felt wiser after leaving
Maja’s house. Life itself
was a tutorial. I’d gathered
Cabin in Snow
Outside a cabin in snow,
we are, and hear our, breathing here.
And wind in pines shucks
itself through sound like snakes
slipping through their summer skins.
And it is easy out here. And out
here it is easy to admire
an image-aided concept
of cabins in snow. And
it is easy inside a cabin
now to believe in an Idea
of Winter, for notions of snow
furnish our true cabin,
consciousness—which, fragile amidst
oblivion’s drifts, stays sturdy against howling.
Snow Geese
When geese venture forth
they have an innate sense of direction.
Soft wings straddle stars
stroking snow flaked skies with certainty.
There is a heartbeat
coursing the air with life, a determination
to survive, to reach
the sun, to shrug off winter's baleful eye.
That is why they scythe
moon slivered nights with screams, leaving
black northern skies,
and crystal lakes, for rum soaked seas.
In spring, a beckoning
beneath the skin, to answer the call
of the great white north
the instinct to return, to be reborn.
Flame or not
Leaf-detritus is pool-clung
Held in
Rankled-water
Battle-aftermath,
Winter beats a hollowed-drum.
Winter
Clouded with snow
The cold winds blow,
And shrill on leafless bough
The robin with its burning breast
Alone sings now.
The rayless sun,
Day's journey done,
Sheds its last ebbing light
On fields in leagues of beauty spread
Unearthly white.
Thick draws the dark,
And spark by spark,
The frost-fires kindle, and soon
Over that sea of frozen foam
Floats the white moon.
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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