A New Selected Poems

That Silent EveningI will go back to that silent eveningwhen we lay together and talked in silent voices,while outside slow lumps of soft snowfell, hushing as they got near the ground,with a fire in the room, in which centuriesof tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,without a crackle, into morning light.Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.When we got home we turned and looked backat our tracks twining out of the woods,where the branches we brushed against let fallpuffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence,like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritchamong the trees, which is the sound that diesinside the sparks from the wedge when the sledgehits it off center telling everything insideit is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed upbut without arms and so to our eyes lonesome,and yet also--how can we know this?--happy!in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow,not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willingnot to meet until heaven, but here and theretreading slubby kissing stops, our trackswobble across the snow their long scratch.So many things that happen here are really little more,if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,are almost ready, already, to bandage the onewhom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how whenwe might lose each other, scratches scratches scratchesfrom this moment to that. Then I will go backto that silent evening, when the past just managedto overlap the future, if only by a trace,and the light doubles and caststhrough the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.