Part 3 (1/2)

BLIZZARD

Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down-- the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes-- Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude.

The man turns and there-- his solitary track stretched out upon the world.

TO WAKEN AN OLD LADY

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

Gaining and failing they are buffetted by a dark wind-- But what?

On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested, the snow is covered with broken seedhusks and the wind tempered by a shrill piping of plenty.

WINTER TREES

All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.

COMPLAINT

They call me and I go It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks.

The door opens.

I smile, enter and shake off the cold.

Here is a great woman on her side in the bed.

She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy!

Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one gold needle!

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compa.s.sion.

THE COLD NIGHT

It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars-- like the bare thighs of the Police Seargent's wife--among her five children....

No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted gra.s.s. One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold...!

White thighs of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April....

In April I shall see again--In April!

the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergent's wife perfect still after many babies.