I came over the snow – the packed snow
The ice-glaze hardened and polished,
Slithering the A 30, two hundred miles,
The road unnatural and familiar,
A road back into myself
After the cosmic disaster –
The worst snow and freeze-up for fifteen years,
Twenty miles an hour, over fallen heaven.
I came to the house
In the blue December twilight.
Just light enough
To fork up my potatoes, to unbed them
From my careful clamp. I shelled off their snowed-over coverlet.
They seemed almost warm in their straw.
They exhaled the sweetness
Of the hopes I’d dug into them. It was a nest
Secret, living, the eggs of my coming year,
Like my own plump litter, my secret family,
Little earthen embryos, little fists
And frowning brows and the old, new sleep-smell of earth.
I picked over my apples,
My Victorias, my pig’s noses,
In the dark outhouse, and my fat Bramleys.
My spring prayers still solid,
My summer intact in spite of everything.
I filled for you
A sack of potatoes and a sack of apples.
And I inspected my gladioli bulbs
In the dusty loft, in their dry rags, hibernating
(I did not know they were freezing to death).
Then I crept through the house. You never knew
How I listened to our absence,
A ghostly trespasser, or my strange gloating
In that inlaid corridor, in the snow-blue twilight,
So precise and tender, a dark sapphire.
The front room, our crimson chamber,
With our white-painted bookshelves, our patient books,
The rickety walnut desk I paid six pounds for,
The horse-hair Victorian chair I got for five shillings,
Waited only for us. It was so strange!
And the crimson cataract of our stair Wilton
Led up to caverns of twelfth-century silence
We had hardly disturbed, in our newness.
Listening there, at the bottom of the stair,
Under the snow-loaded house
Was like listening to the sleeping brain-life
Of an unborn baby.
The house made newly precious to me
By your last lonely weeks there, and your crying.
But sweet with cleanliness,
Tight as a plush-lined casket
In a safe
In the December dusk. And, shuttered by wintering boughs,
The stained church-windows glowed
As if the sun had sunk there, inside the church.