As though he turned the pages
of a book in a darkening room—each page
blank, a wordless flint-blue—kept turning,
reading, carrying the familiar plot
the way it should go, and wasn’t deterred
by dark, by the failing stove, though breath’s
a shape he watches, warmth an ebb he feels
—now, noticeably, mind frames his view
for winter. Calmly, he searches
the twilight-tinted window:
drained, grainy as an old photograph,
a fence consumed by withered honeysuckle
guards pasture, slate oaks churn noiselessly,
a crow stabs straw-drab grass for grubs,
the odd acorn the squirrel missed.
While he searches, the downstairs radio,
the stove’s hissing ashes, familiar lines
from books, like the darkening room itself, unfocus
around the blue pane—as though, finally,
he sees what he sees things through.
Distances and a sense of distance,
as chill and dark combine in the room, converge,
frame a flint-blue perspective
he enters, as he writes on a bare page:
The mind is our four walls against the wind,
Our roof against the rain…
…then stops
and simply enters, as though footprints
trailing across blue snow at nightfall
ended, abruptly, on an empty field.