Finally, under thick cover of night,
The snow fell, without wind, and fat as plates.
Wine-rested, I rose a little before five,
Cowed by the darkness of this quiet mountain,
With lion and elk and pheasant roaming
Eight thousand feet above any ocean,
And that much closer to the gates of Heaven
Smuggled somewhere within this small lark’s mind
As it sits patiently on a bare branch
Hardly startled when I turned the porch light
On. Something in me, something struggling
Inside me, starts slowly now to feel soothed.
But it’s neither from the solitude nor
From the barest blue the black sky became
As dawn turned her silver key in the door.
It will snow here for days. The air is whiter
Than whiteness. Nothing of a blue remains
But for two plump blue jays I’d failed to see
Until the larks began on the final
Tree spotted with snowed juniper berries.
The runts scattered as the two jays
Landed, then three, then four, then six, then eight;
They had been watching the larks all along.
Waiting for them to find what’s there to be
Found amid several feet of snow. The tree
Bent but would not give way. And when the jays
Twisted their thankless trunks to pry the dangled
Dark scarlet globes from the tips of their twigs,
They fell, one after the other, like blue
Shards from a shattered stained glass. Then, the larks
Came back and continued as they had been,
Nibbling at what they wanted or needed,
Indifferent to the interruption. Or,
Were they the interruption? These are things
That only the end knows. But the end, like
All I’ve ever told you, is uncertain.