Landscape Poems

I

Only such faintly desolate wan places

Could bear tonight.

So like a slight young child

With thin quiescent hands

A pallor of dawn traces,

Or an old woman whose years

Run like water under ice,

These motionless pines and sands

Take the sunset light.

Only those who have a little died

Could bear tonight.

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A tree may be laughter in the spring,

Or a promise,

Or conceit.

In the summer it may be anything

Lazy and warm with life

And sweet.

In the fall,

It is the answer

To a long-forgotten call.

Hazel Collister Hutchison

But on a lonely winter night,

In still air,

When it takes the shape of a candle-flame

Springing dark from a hill all white,

It is a dare.

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They have built a blossoming tree

Out of their talk*about you.

Soft white flower sentences

And fluttering little word petals

Make luminous beauty in the shadow

That is the silence between them.

Flaking like dogwood

Into pale layers of conversation,

The tree of their talking

Is a wall behind which I am hiding.

They do not know that my silence

Is the dark trunk of their tree.

They do not know that my thoughts

Give each glimmering petal its twitch of black.

Hazel Collister Hutchison