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The Snow Grey Violet In The Ghostly Yellow Moonrise

The snow grey violet in the ghostly yellow moonrise.
Glazed mirrors of crude ice on the south side
of the metallic waves that faced the sun all day.
As if the white were the dark negative space
and the Prussian blue shadows of the cedars
had more substance than the light.
The burning clarity of -20 Celsius
when the Dutch elms and the basswood trees
and the oak on the hill
that keeps dropping its twigs
like frost-bitten fingers
groaned and cracked like a vice-grip of ice
crushing Frobisher’s ship
like a black walnut between its teeth.
And everywhere you walked
was like walking on the roof of a greenhouse
you kept putting your foot through.
Your breath growing stalactites of ice in your beard
so whenever you breathed out
it looked like smoke coming out of a cave.
I’d stand in the spent garden
among the bare tent-poles
that the summer had carried
like the fire of the scarlet runners
all the way up the burning rungs
of a ladder to heaven
that now stood out in the snow
like the skeletons of tipis
and abandoned easels
in a deserted native village.
The locust tree thorned like a bird of prey.
My tiny, tiny heart
like a solitary lightbulb in a well housing
trying to keep the pump from freezing up
as if I had stage fright
in front of all those stars.
Or I was a comma-sized deer mouse,
all ashes on the outside
but warm embers within,
standing in a splash of juniper
looking up at the moon like an owl
with a cosmic wingspan
and blood on its talons.
Far off, the barking of a farmyard dog
investigates the predatory silence
by throwing down the gauntlet of its voice
to hear who answers the challenge.
The coyotes lift their heads and snarl
and curl back into their body heat.
Too cold for man or beast.
The vole and the shrew and the mouse
sleep under the snow
in little igloos
lined with a few dry leaves
and a cache of seeds
that will get them through the winter
if they’re not crushed to death by snowmobiles.
Everything fixed, crystalline, structured
except for the black water of the creek
under its corrective lens of ice
as if time itself were held in abeyance
and decay were a thing of the past
and change that brings so much suffering
was put on hold like an abandoned barn
with the names of Irish immigrant kids
carved into its rafters,
scuttled like an ark on Mt. Ararat
that had unloaded all its occupants on land
escaping the 1848 Irish potato famine.
Time stops and there’s no pulse to space.
There’s no death or birth
in the void of the moment.
No movement to the wind
and even the ghosts
of the immigrant kids
are trying not to freeze their tongues
to the shrinking dime of the moon
as it adds more silver
to the copper of its coinage
rising toward zenith
like the cost of a chocolate bar.
I’d stand there stomping my feet
in a slow snow dance
around the small fire
that flared and embered in my body
a firefly shy of going out
to keep from passing out from hypothermia.
Smell of smoke pluming from the Selkirk chimney,
the windows of the farmhouse
shedding the petals of black-eyed Susans
like warm panels of light
spreading something flannel
over the cold bed of the snow.
All the cats, all the dogs in for the night
stretched out anoxically upon one another
in the igneous glow of the black airtight
that stood in the middle of the living room
like a black rhino
with a bent chimney pipe for a horn
in the middle of three hundred acres of snow
it wasn’t going to give in to
like a local ice age
it had already been through.
Everybody in but me mesmerized by
the uncompromising beauty of the scene,
as the stars burned like bridges in the abyss
and everything that lived under the sun by day,
surviving every which way they could
shared the same exact cause of death
by the time it went down
and the cold was one law for all
with no exceptions, no mercy, no malice,
no regrets for the blue-jay
that didn’t eat enough sunflower seeds
to keep from falling from its perch
like just another ornithological statistic.
And you couldn’t say with a straight face
even indifference
because there was nothing there
to ignore in the first place
and to shake your fist at the gods
as if there were gods
that did and didn’t give a shit
was to miss the point entirely.
A cosmic view through a local window
of eyes, flesh and blood,
without a frame of reference.
A man standing in a dead garden
in awe of the unearthly radiance
of the moon on the ice and the snow
looking upon the uneventful beauty
in the stillness of death
that would overtake many in the night
as he added his own ghost of breath
like smoke from the chimney
to the sublime inconsequence of it all.
Regulus in Leo going down in the west
like a toppled sphinx.
Twenty-five years of license plates
from 1939 to l964
nailed to the barn door
like some kind of helpless calendar
that ran out of cars and time
and seemed to imply
1965 was the year
life let go of the farm
and wandered off into the abyss
like a man no one knew existed
and only a very few would miss for awhile.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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