R. Cory in Winter

The wind repeats itself, dry-leafed

rhyme in the pergola.

Richard feels forgotten, elided, the more alone.

The fire-red dot of his cigar

punctuates the past like an end stop.

This is his land, his house, his view of the sea.

The wind, after all, does not feel

the otherness within. It cannot

strike flame to a good cigar, or turn its back and go

the direction that narrows the spaniel's eyes,

toward an oriel corbeled from a stone house,

and a face visible in a lattice window.

In his past, distant farmhouse lights were like candles

on the altar of a hill,

and the road twisted on into a place behind darkness.

People who traveled that road

raised a dry wake of caliche dust. But his past

has gone small, hard as a rose thorn,

and the moon's soft halo tonight, distant light

bent through ice crystals,

is the pale round angel of death, who says only O.