Winter Dreams
The rub and tear and fray of all that
is and isn’t going on, getting done,
moving, changing, growing, dying.
My garden, back yard, front yard,
the trees we plant and neglect, roses
that bloom in frost, dying perennials,
perennial dying – throbbing motivic
pulse of life and death, C major and
C minor. Beethoven manages this
in his symphonies, but I am not
Beethoven. Nor would wish to be.
*
Gaining an hour is easy on the body,
it’s losing that’s hard. Waking, I
think of my losses, actual, potential.
The weather yesterday would have
been right for a memorial to loss:
relentless lashing wind and rain,
trees thrashed by it, bursts of half
snow, leaves torn off, tumult.
*
I dream that my husband and I are
walking out onto a path that seems
to go into, then through a river, and
my husband, who’s ahead of me, says
“oh, this is a ladder of stepping stones” –
little islands of “land” one has to step
to and on in this watery realm. Later
in the dream, he’s unable to read
a sheet of paper I’m showing him.
*
At the church where I go to meditate,
a fellow “sitter” says that all that really
matters is how one treats other people.
What about work, I wonder, about
meaningful work, creativity? By his
lights, Beethoven would be a failure.
*
Again in dream, I’m taking a walk
that reminds me of being on the Isle
of Que where I lived for years, but
I’m also near the church where I go
now to meditate. There’s snow on
the sloping path in front of me, it’s
getting icy, there are great banks
of snow, masses of it all around me.
Where has it all come from? From
everyone talking about last winter,
our fears about the winter to come.
*
Nightmare: a weird dream in which
I have to help carry a dead body that
is decaying, spilling its entrails. Waking
I’m struck by the thought of my being
older than my father was when he died.
For years it’s been a commonplace in
my thinking about my mother, but I’d
never thought it before about him.
*
We have put out the winter bird feeder,
we have taken down the summer bird
houses which never house birds.
Listening to an account of the death
of Beethoven, my husband weeps.
The birds have already begun to come
to the feeder. Winter is here and so
is hunger. The flocks of the hungry
cannot be fed by this feeder, even
the sparrows alone are too many.