WINTER IS PASSING
(after Conrad Aiken)
DJ Bartel
Winter is passing without releasing its fury
Its chill never chips at the crust of tragedy
Its winds from the north fold in abstract
Its rain is timid of offending God’s sister, Nature,
With a rival show of strength
The uprush of wings signals the death of some
Other world where Chaos will land.
In it all we sit at a window, sheathed in ice
Remarking on the calm, aching inside for the frost
To freeze life to the edge of death
Life immobile life unthinking
Life caught in a step a photograph
Wrapped in gauze buried in gray of our legs
In mid-step strapped together by whirs and whispers
Futures and new wonderful sighs.
Your dark reflection twists your image and your reverence
Distorts your gesture to sacrosanct.
You sit at an angle to the smooth pane
It polishes the night
Sharpens the darkness
For me only darkness
Without form or conviction
You gesture to the sparklings you see
A nod tells you I have looked and seen
Only a hollow and the faint pointless
Stirrings of gleam and glisten
Candles burning their dusty aura
I turn away and go muttering
Contradictions among my things
Wine bottle corks saved from I don’t know
An iPhone with a hairline crack in the screen
A bill past due a month
A biography of Mozart another of Henry James
The brittle flicker of order seeking disorder
Energy seeking purpose life chipped at by death.
Three treble notes from the speaker perfect
Themselves in silence lifeless as their memory
Or the winter that rests beyond the glass.
The cello snaps off at the end of a phrase.
The highs of the piano are clipped.
And what of the rain?
Would it be a warning of turquoise
Downpour of purple
Darkening shroud of regret and inconsequence
Effluence from death?
It would be so if you saw it so.
And if you saw it so would you step through the glass to it?
Or would it be an oxidation of whiteness
Shimmer of ivory aureate rendering of bliss and scintillation
Or chant from an incarnation?
It would be if you saw it so.
And if you saw it so, would I?
Or would it be just confusing and wet?
Sheathed in ice longing for the frost we fear
We hear or think we hear the echo of a voice
That was always silence. I am ceramic
Standing to leave
You pray or you know the echo is more
Than a whispering from the hollow beyond
The glass waiting to receive us without a struggle
Signaling to God or to nothing
Swallowing it all - silence and death
And a fury that will never be spent.
