Now, when the thatch-roofed cottages
Send up their puffs and curls
From heating folk and pottages,
And steadily thickening swirls
Of snow-feathers settle, limning
Lintels and mullioned panes,
And door lanterns waver, dimming,
And rusty weather vanes
Creak as they flip directions like
Befuddled gyroscopes,
A chilling bleakness seems to strike
Down all too human hopes
For what the year now past would bring
And how our lives would change,
Before our goals for everything
Had drifted out of range
(Time set aside for self-improvement
Got taken up like slack;
The old inertias stymied movement;
She never called you back).
When I, to see what prevents me,
Go blundering outside,
The blank the winter presents me
Scintillates far and wide
With all distinct articulation
Of coppice, hedge, and heather
Erased in glazed disanimation
By all-encasing weather
That levels whatever playing field
We thought the game was on,
And levels us, who stand revealed
As going, if not gone.
An influence presents itself
Where all this absence is,
As if one old book on my shelf
Inscribed precisely this,
As if down an empty country lane
I saw Thomas Hardy go,
Ghosting the track of some whitened pain
Like boot-prints filled by snow.
Joseph Harrison is the author of two books of poetry, Someone Else’s Name and Identity Theft.
