Winter Through a Bedroom Window

Red-dirt browns, spring Greens,

like youth

or noise, fresh sounds of quiet, living things,

bend stubborn ways to usher in

a roaring silent winter

as skies and earth grow heavy and white with age.

Voices lose their place among expected things.

Limbs are lent to ground with intermittent groans

and cries

of oak and maple.

Names like colored leaves left over

from a borrowed time,

whose legacies are kept by faith,

and not distinction.

Heavens have now forced the sparsest clouds to flight.

In their place:

stars,

bloated stars,

swoll up,

create a firmament

opaque

and white.

Four pillars of a wooden home, green once, and bright,

shake, as if it were unclothed tonight.

Brave pillars, cold assaults of ice withstanding,

lay quiet

in the face

of the subdued scratchings of my pen.

Whispered:

"

It is not terrible to winter off old leaves and sleep

until a Sound is sent to fetch and bathe us in the warm,

sweet-scented springs of waking

and lay us down to live inside a field

of gentleness

and peace

that blossoms summeringly.

"