Midwinter

And again, at dusk, I find the madwoman,

Crouched on the stone bridge by the cornfields,

Feeding corn to the fish. Though there are no fish

In the river. The river is dead or nearly so,

The water gray as stolen sleep or spoiled sheets.

The woman looks sheepish. But not like a sheep.

Her skin is sallow. Her hair uncombed. Her coat

Unravelling at wrist and hem. The coat’s woven cloth

Has faded from overwashing and it is the same color

As the haze the fields exude in the morning or sometimes

At dusk, a foggy lavender mist that smells of tin

And fresh blood and of the slender green sticks we burn

When we strip back the garden in the first warm weather....

Not like a sheep. More like a child who has gotten

The sum wrong, but stubbornly knows the sum

Doesn’t matter as much as one thinks....Corn cobs

Drop into the poisoned water. The ghostly cobs

Float and turn like boats made from paper. And the day

Grows colder....When the woman speaks she does not

Look up. She does not take her eyes from the sliding water.

“Feed the fish?” she asks. And then she shudders.

Frightened, perhaps, as I am by the flat sound of her voice.

Or by the sudden thinning of the air. Or by the way

The narrow rim of light over the blackened tree line

Comes and is gone before one has time to see it....

If I say, “We can go home now,” if I kneel down

And say, “We can go home, the fish are sleeping,”

To whom do I speak? And out of what knowledge?...

The water moves like ash. And like ash it makes

No sound. The woman crouched on the stone bridge

Picks from the corn heaped at her feet one pale cob,

And without looking up, she holds it out toward me.