Thaw comes in mid-December.¬ The river runs full,
a sheet of glass at twilight, smooth flowing, gold glowing…
Behind the naked trees, the sun begins
to go down on the horizon…the trees as if touched
on the sky by the twitch of a subtle draftsman’s pencil
that knew to suggest rather than to say…the sun, ruddy,
growing larger, that seems a Cyclops’ eye.¬ This “I”
that sees the sun, coins it in the sky as well as sees,
is polymorphous, perverse, apt to sire its own terror
even here in these woods that emerge brown and moist
and gentled from beneath the snow blanket.¬ The white dog
goes before me like my own ghost, now seen, now unseen…
I go to the woods to be apart, not simply away,
but in tatters and phrases, in elliptic accidents
of attention, eyes, ears, nose, skin loose from the yoke
of purpose.¬ I go to the woods to be a part,
part of the wind, the light, the sway of the trees,
the deft shyness of the occasional rabbit, the liquid
discretion of the river, mirroring, mirroring.
It seems the white dog who summons me with her insistence,
the tension in her flesh the house can not contain,
but when we emerge I am face-to-face with my self-deception:
the house can not contain me either, however meekly
I sit and stare into the fire’s fading embers.
We walk curves in the woods, guided like a boomerang,
now beside the river, where a duck and a green winged drake
bob, paddle on orange webbed feet,
now ranging away through a stand of pines, through a scrubby place,
up a face of rock and down the other side to enter
where the great trees grow that groan on icy nights
in the wind…there is a cardinal, like a dart of blood…
the dog flushes a small animal, seems to catch it…
there are two voices growling behind a rock, the dog emerges
shaking her head…an indistinct brown shape
scurries off…I laugh…the dog forgets her disappointment.
We come back from the woods, like musicians from a trio.
1979