I heard day’s footfall moments before
it appeared upon my porch with its chafed
hands and empty pockets, asking me
to forego my errands and chores and
to care enough to step outside and witness
a world that was oddly still and quilted,
perhaps rightly thinking it might yet
ease and open an aging heart, and so,
with head bowed and chin tucked to
my chest, I followed, watching my
frozen breath rise as we passed the
brick silo, festooned with leafless vines
and crumbling into drifts, and further
on, pausing to consider the way the
slanting shafts of sunlight fell through
the bowed heads of mottled birch and
across outcroppings of stone tattooed
with lichen; the perfect silence of
snowbound fields and the far-distant
tongues of smoke rising without wind;
the tilted row of utility poles impaled
by ice; and the cardinal-red clusters of
winterberry that flew apart in glazed
scatter above the fence-line before we
continued on towards a portion of sky
that appeared to have been refurbished
by God’s palette knife with dollops
of color applied evenly across the
horizon and leaching into – and through –
a lower layer of cloud with metallic
flecks of blue serving as the binding
medium while, to the west, a pale,
pockmarked moon foreshadowed
a world turning slowly towards a day
that I had seen many times before
and never acknowledged with so much
as a nod nor even a feigned welcome.
