I.
Darkness comes early, stays late
In my winter country; the frost
Goes four feet down; trees are like sticks;
A light snow lingers
For a month or two, getting dirty. I write every day
But throw much away.
My third book will appear in the spring, a small book,
A slight book,
Containing no plays or long narrative poems,
Borrowing hardly at all from the middle ages,
Making few affirmations, avoiding inversions,
Using iambics distrustfully, favoring lines
Of odd lengths and irony.
I am forty.
I seem to know the dimensions of what I can do
And the season to do it in.
Give me a few more winters like this one, and spring—
Or the thought of spring—
Will cease to be a disturbance, and I’ll be
Solid,
Jackson.
II.
Steam on a winter stream. Cold air
Meeting warm water
Condenses? I suppose so.
But why should the water not freeze
Like me? I don’t know.
I am mufflered, mittened, booted and earflapped
Like a child. I am taking the air.
The air is bitter.
The water is dark, incredibly dark; I look down
And see nothing and see that Narcissus
Was a summer child, a child who knew green
Scum and tadpoles, not
Black water.
Nature would rather we rest our psyches in winter.
She gives us no looking glass; she withdraws
From our poems, leaving us
Only our own thoughts, words and inflections
To fund solace in. When we look out
We see nothing like us; we live
In a land of the dead with our mittens on; if we
Walk all day in the rutted road by the stream,
We find not even a stranger to befriend us.
But I am forty.
I look down from the stone bridge to the water,
And I see, yes, my face. It sends me,
Jackson.
III.
And the lawyers said, and the wisemen said,
“It is better to come to terms.”
With what?
With all that ice, stickery, black water?
Of course not. Given a choice we choose
To walk in the meadows, pick clover, commune with
What there is to commune with. It is moral.
How, then, come to terms?
What the lawyers meant, and the wisemen, was that we
Trundle out to the stone bridge and play at terms.
Then the snow sparkles,
The stream converts to a prize-winning shot from a kodak,
And we think of spring.
I have a book of lyrics coming out
In the spring.
I am twenty.
The spirit is strong within me; I have not
Come to terms with winter but bludgeoned winter
To my terms.
Is the air warm?
I take off my coat.
Is the grass soft?
Off, shoes.
And so on.
One does these things as a poet. I am a poet,
Jackson.