What stops me is the big
indifference
of weather, the remoteness it shows
in all its peremptory gestures.
But then there’s Bach coming out
of the air, an equal mystery. Rejoice!
he says, all ye ransomed souls.
Imagine. Though there are times
I have to close my eyes
in passing, feeling
the filthy shape of things sprawled
in snow by the roadside, knowing
for a speechless instant those small
lives
quenched in a twinkling. Then to see
rocks, their colours, as if for the
first time:
smoked topaz, bleached emerald
and washed out onyx, seams of
charcoal
blazing their almost unchanging
lives
on a backdrop of
snow and steam
where a factory chimney sends its
hot head out to lick and be altered
by the near-zero air. We’re on that edge
too, it seems, flung from one
element
to another, ice to air to fire and
falling
back to earth together, talking as
if
our lives depended on it, finding
grammar is destiny, syntax its
guardian
angel. Now, in flame-coloured jackets
a pack of children is playing, tiny
figures
on a flat field of ice, standing or
running
or walking on water, in the chill of
which
the slowed fish are turning slow
circles.