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.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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