Poems from the Dead of Winter

Poems from the Dead of Winter

I.

Winter is coming

I can feel the warmth leaving

My body

Sky grey

Lost with the gulls

Flying without purpose

And inside

There is ice clinging

To my heart

Though my soul burns . . .

I am fading

I am already half a ghost

I don’t even recognize

Myself

In the mirror

II.

There is a distance

I must travel

Before nightfall

And I am afraid

I

Will not

Make

It

III.

Petrel wings in the storm shut sky

cannot take me home

home where the earth lies hushed

awaiting my touch

my breath

a lover’s presence after long

absence

IV.

sitting in the dead of night

eyes lifting to lights upon the horizon

mind follows reckless

with no safe perch to rest on

and I fly all night

through the cutting wind

‘til I cannot think anymore

and sleep finds me is a stranger’s position

in the coldness of a loved one’s bed

V.

She is gone into winter

And silence holds me tight

The same silence I dance with

Each day

Each night

I wonder

If her soul is speaking even now

Or her heart

Or her mind

And what is she saying

To bring us together

To keep us apart

I am a stranger

To the inner doors of her heart

And though it is hers to know

even she has lost the keys

VI.

Swiftly now

Love comes to root

In soil hard from winter

And though it is known

That love is hardy

It can only prosper

With the gentlest of

Gardeners

And

A little sun and rain

Hurry now

The Gardener is

Leaving

Elegy For Summer

she died in summer

leaving flowers wilting

by the kitchen window

leaving a voice caught

and spun

in the wandering light

from hallway to room

and now the seasons are all

tilted

by shadow

by silence

by a warmth and color

that pales and flutters

in the empty spaces

where it will never be summer

again

All His Sins Remembered

All His Sins Remembered

 Unheeded.
 Untouched.
 Unloved.

 This soul that waits like cold smoke over dark and silent waters.  He had spent a lifetime denying my presence.  He had mortared and bricked me from the sun and moon, from the wind and rain.  But still I lived in the silence between his heartbeats, in the suffocating confines of his conscience.

 This night, I stand trembling as a lover come to quench a lusting thirst, filling as though stars were rising in my eyes.  The cemetery, holding fast the darkness between pale stones, becomes a mute witness to my unfolding.  Here in this necropolis, my memories come in gatherings like dried leaves, scurrying and scratching in cool moonlit breaths and then are no more.  I kneel before his grave and knead fingers through fresh soil, inhaling the intoxication of time and night whose mating had produced such a rapacious daughter to lay within—all his sins remembered.

 I gaze at the words chiseled upon the marble headstone.  I had but murdered a killing stranger with a familiar name and visage.  Nothing more.

 I watch the moon slipping gracefully through reaching fingers—save those of mine own.  I whisper my farewell.  The past is dead and as true as the rock-filled coffin beneath me.  I am dead, never to return.  I am reborn, to begin again.

 I walk through the cemetery gates and into an unfathomable night, till at last I stand naked and raw and beautiful.  My eyes filling with stars.

In the Silence of Her Eyes

In the Silence of Her Eyes

I watched her die in the rain.  A soft, cold rain that seeped slowly into the bone.  I’ll never be warm again.  And I’ll never love the rain . . . .

Something intangible had fled from me; a spirit bearing the last vestiges of hope and joy.  Perhaps fled was not the right word.  There was no dead of night reckoning.  No midnight weeping at the abrupt realization. It had been more like a small puncture that had bled out over the course of a long journey.  Towards the end, I could feel it all coming to a one-sided stop in the middle of a vast shelterless desert. 

We stopped talking.  We stopped feeling.  Hands in time, hands through the darkness, ceased to meet.  We drifted, inarticulate, suddenly strangers with familiar faces, through the days like icy smoke.  The rooms of our house echoed our presence, then faded into silence.  The substance between us had thinned to a transparent thread, and we wondered when it would finally break. And who would be the cause.

The ticking clock above the mantle measured the passage of our trackless existence.  Each tick, each tock, moving us into a future leached of color; opening a door to a winter-killed garden populated by memories flash frozen into empty reliquaries.

I remember watching her face as she slept, soft breaths in the waning night, my eyes lingering, my mind holding fast to every curve, every line, my heart trembling in the effort to bring the past to life; to join what I had lost with what I once had.  I watched until dawn and wept softly in the ashes of a fire long dead.

Towards the end she begged me to stay, her fingers like frightened doves on her face, reaching out through the pale-light spaces to my arm.   Foolishly I told her that it would not be for long.  A time to ponder.  A time to regain a pathway back to my own forgotten heart. 

“I don’t want to lose you,” she said, the words stuttered and clenched between sobs.  And for one second, for one brief halting of the world, I felt a meeting of souls, of old lovers, of eternal friends; a fleeting glimpse of our younger selves in an ancient cracked mirror.

But it was all too late.  I was on a journey without road maps.  I knew not what I was doing, only that I had to do it. 

On the bridge, I watched her die with each passing second.  She stood still, her eyes fading into a darkness, a silence that would allow her heart to live on, though the world had come to an end.  I closed my eyes.

A statue in a winter-killed garden.  Fashioned by an artist both cruel and loving, with hands stained by blood and tears.

As I turned to leave . . . one last look.

And in the silence of her eyes, all that I had loved, all that had I remembered, trembled gently and died in the soft, cold rain.