Winter V - the Light the Dark
Braving the cold air
For the moment it takes
To stroll to the end of my driveway
Wearing but a wool sweater
I bow
To the mid-afternoon
Picking up
A popsicle of morning bound newspaper
Straightening up
To the miles and miles of blue sky
As if I am the stranded man
Under one palm tree on the one island
Captioned in a New Yorker cartoon
Hand on my hip
The other holding a salute
Surveying the exquisite sheet of sunlight
Snapped over this frozen ocean of white
Pretending to believe it’s a trick on the eye
To see a picket fence of tree trunk shadows and candy stripes
Flattened to the snow
Disavowing all property lines
As the caw caw caw of a crow
Crackles a warning hello
His black body a shark eye
Staring sideways
From the skull of a stoic Oak
Down to me
Then back to the snow
And a trail of stitched holes
Melting and gaping from the feign of heat
Evolved
From the paws of an overnight tomcat
To that of a deer
To now
The plucked boots of a man.
What stranger would stomp in circles
Around my house and under a reading lamp
Like this?
Searching for meaning in day-old headlines?
But for a shadow
Let loose from his own wolf body
Tearing from what blocks the sun
Temporarily born from the dark to the light
To come and go as all in one.
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