Prehistoric Winter
The cold would just as soon you didn't make it home
Till spring, when frozen bodies thaw,
Gaunt coyotes bless their stars and drag you off.
The only thing that's stirring in the crystal strath
Is deep beneath
Waiting for:
not yet,
not yet,
not yet...
Life is wily.
Winter can go to hell, says life, let's take a nap.
Next year's wildflowers: numb bullets.
Sleek fat rodents curl in thatch-lined burrows
Peaceful piles of neighbors
Sleep like their young, too deep for dreaming.
Well, lesser beings
May stoop to hibernation.
Noble *****sapiens shun the easy path
Push on with shelter, firewood, the hunt
Push on till half demented, two-thirds blind.
The after-solstice strengthening cold,
Not without some irony
Would just as soon be entertained.
The ageless cold abides
Content to watch you struggle
Till, your lips too blue to shape a single curse
You throw your hat down, seek your simple hearth,
Try again tomorrow.
Never mind the swiftness of the weather
Abrupt and deafening storms that shred your lungs with ice...
Never mind, but then...
When winter's expectant quiet looms a bit too long
It settles in your bones...
Never mind the quiet.
Bring to mind instead, the gentle promise of spring, when grasses –
No. Not yet.
A cold, unearthly howling
splits the silence
keen as shards...
Seems to split your very skull and makes you
Crave the silence back with all you are.
Nothing with a throat, no lung
Could make that sound.
...weather-sculpted ice in deep ravines
...the wind, just so
Blows anthems from beyond to stump your earthly ear
But you know nothing.
It's a sound that overwhelms, you've guessed as much.
And if it leaves you flat too long
The cold would just as soon supply your grave
As wait eleven winters more
And watch another elder making
Breakfast for a bear.
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