January 2, 2021: Peterborough

January 2, 2021:

Peterborough

And again a few inches of snow.  The earth

is as firm as ram's horn, ram's skull.  It puts up

with what falls on it with a retiring saint's

patience.  What other choice?  All of what 

winter is

has begun now and those November 

and December dress

rehearsals are called off and the stage

is set in place for months to come.  Still, 

the shifting

props.  Still the blunt circumference

of the thuggish days-long falling

rains who's only course is shifting 

without choice to ice that thickens and clings,

then settles  

broken to the edges to eventually

meld the middle of ponds.  Limbs

dislodge.  Fall.  Are brought when some thaw

is up to the dam and stuck there

until more 

flood lifts it up and over the white and yellow 

water, water that ages, makes its cold

case stick like slabs of fat

left curing left unrendered perhaps  

in a smokehouse, or maybe not unrendered

but given 

to take a different rest, a, well, cure.

They'll come for it later, the ones

who hung it there, such unassuming

maids who will make it take their dried

and pressed seeds, to pack it in bricks

in little cages 

and give pleasure to blue-

birds, red and golden cardinals, occasional

chickadees.  How myriad these

images, suffered from the coming

on of winter, to be frozen, to be suspended

in suet, in

highlights folded through that yellowing

Goldilocks ice to slide like a sleight

into divinity for the marvelous birds, 

all for the birds who perch beneath the 

stripped bare

(broken now in the last storm 

and belly up) lilac branches.  Winter

thickens.  We bring in the split

and seasoned cedar and birch and build

fires against it 

and sing our praises while the smoke goes

up through the brick chimney and out 

again into the lilac, mingling again (though

unrecognizably changed) with the breast

feathers, dam

water and the almost finished, for

today at least, raining then snowing sky.