Winter Night

How often we draw back, detached from the world

Like a star, and thinking the mind a pure space,

Imagine our fate somehow suspended-almost

As if, like a far eye, or a small fist

Of light, we might take the whole of it, coldly, in.

But ah, what a show . . . for nothing, really, stops-

And the further we fade, the more the smallest pain

Heightens, iced to a moon's edge. O, could we just

See! How even without us the vanishing earth

Goes on, child without mother, bearing itself

Blindly toward spring! Would we still, like gods,

Think ourselves beyond it all? Now, shrinking

Within, we only at best mimick the dead,

Who have earned with a life that richer, darker distance.

WINTER TREE

Deeply the dead take root, and driving through,

Breach the air with this wild shock of branch-

Now Medusa's hair, a crackling blackness,

The whole sky a stare turned to stone-

Now, slowly, an older, darker idea

Of fire, the brittle hand smoking up

Toward glory . . . Great tree reaching through,

What is this shadowy vision you barely cast?

We'd keep the brighter gods if not for you: -

How, like a demon, your frozen leap shatters

The white horizon, masks the snow, makes

A mystery again of earth! But O, black twist

Of bone, beautiful pain, when will the robin

Light, and the heart, singing, begin to change?