The Human Seasons: Elements At War and Peace, Part Iii

3. Wrapped close, in implacable, bitter embrace, The winter grips the land and holds it immobile, The cat upon its mouse. Stripped bare and glazed with stony ice Ashudder beneath a slatecloud sky That drops its snow in a hush of crowding dimness, A white leaden mantle Is lain over empty fields, piling 'round the trunks of skeletal trees Standing soberly and waving their bony branches in the frozen air The twilight days light a world now comatose, Drawn in against the cold and huddled like Some invalid giant shorn of all his strength, Lying stretched half slain across the firmament Gazing into nothing with a distant blank stare As scattered carrion birds wheel against a wan canvas, Waiting. Those two in their little house circle 'round as well, Moving without purpose through the events of their lives As the cold outside seeps into the rooms Invading their thoughts To make them tremble Shaken in the blindness of their desperation, And though the fire blazes orange-warm in the hearth, Defending this inside space from the day's deep gloom, Autumnal sorrows have collected in the silence And worn their hearts weary with cares, And thus the spirit's wounds have festered and widened, Filling with the poison of despair. Soft sparks the glow of the fire makes in his tired eyes, Reflecting wild fears that her love is lost; They dance in his mind, stabbing with a pain That knows no cure. Long the time he just looks at her, This life that chose to be with him always, And he sees that Whatever The hurt that came between, He cannot bear that she leave him Condemned to go on without her, Alone. Her thoughts for him are much the same, Though she says it not. Yet when at last he reaches out across the table And takes her hand in his, She looks up, and for one long moment They two become the lone human pair In all of space and time, And in one another's moist crystalline gaze They read a deep sweet tale In a language without words. Something melts, And something breaks In that moment when she gently folds Her delicate fingers over his, Looking down again with a schoolgirl smile Spreading irresistable over her face. Outside, in the blackness of the star-shot night, Ice cracks And waters run clear beneath the snow.