Category: Winter Ballads

The course description was accurate.
The lessons are subtle and it will take time
to understand all that is before you,
how to unravel the language,
to detect the rhythm and speed.
And after you have got that far
you can let it sink deeper, holding
your attention on it, naming nothing,
just giving it your whole self until,
with a bright spark, it touches the edges
of your understanding, pushing up
the corners of your mouth.

It will be like this now. Consider it
a class in neutrals and form.
The lessons are subtle and ask for
deep listening and observation.
Our kind, you may have noticed,
seems not to do that well. Most
can’t bother. Some persevere.
And it is for them that the season
comes, and lingers, whispering
its matchless secrets, hour after hour.

I’ve been gathering feathers for years now.
I keep these few in the miniature vases
of which I am so fond on the sill
of the window where I work in winter.
This has been their appointed spot
for a long while. Normally, my eyes
focus beyond them at the scene behind
the spruce’s boughs or at the boughs themselves
where sometimes a bird will light for a moment.
But the cold of the day has glazed the window
with sheets of ice and a garland of frost, directing
my gaze at the feathers, and I think how I love them
and the birds who gave them to me and the images
of birds they evoke in my mind, and the beautiful feeling
of freedom.

What the woods had to say
on this Christmas Eve morning,
along with the snow covered fields,
and the creek, and the blue, distant,
cold. rolling hills, was simply this:

On this day, the light touches us
and we rise in joy. Be at peace.
You are loved, and All is well.

The place has its regulars. They come in shifts,
more or less, the little ones first, chattering
their hellos from the bare branches of the lilac
as I scatter seeds and sing my morning song,
then the woodpecker and the jays. The cardinal
had vanished for a while after the cafe closed
when I went on an October vacation. But lately
he’s been showing up from time to time.
I’m always so happy to see him.
I have a special space for him in my heart.

When I rose this morning, to my surprise,
snow covered the ground and the thermometer
read exactly 0 degrees. I opened the cafe
even before I had my coffee, and they fluttered in,
sweet dears, the instant that they spotted me.
Half an hour later, I glanced out the window
as I dished up bacon and eggs, and there,
more surprising than the morning snow,
a dozen cardinals had gathered, more
than I have ever seen at one time before,
at least half of them bright males, bobbing
down from the lilac, the females huddling
on the rocks in the new-fallen snow,
feasting together as if it was Christmas.

Winter’s arriving with a blast cold enough
to make headlines in the nation’s news.
The TV’s painted faces read the list of dire threats,
worry lines creasing their brows. Any one,
their manner implies, with any sense at all
will double check their provisions and hunker down,
even though Christmas is but three days away.

I zip up my jacket, put on my boots and gloves.
It’s the first full day of winter and I want to greet it
face to face. At the edge of the garden, I find
dried flowers and seedpods dancing in the breeze
on bleached stems, heedless of warnings or weather.
All they know is joy in the very fact of being, today,
as winter arrives, and Christmas is but three days away.