Winterwatching
Looking through steam-misted glass
frosting at its edges, I watch ice
coating the branches of the nearby dogwood.
At just 2PM, the daylight already
unravels toward too-early winter dark.
From across the room, the warmth of the old
soapstone stove reaches toward me, and Cleo,
our black and white grumpy rescue cat, emerges
from behind it, her fur too hot to touch,
flops on the carpet in stove-heat-stupor.
Winnie, the old, orange tiger,
curls tightly into herself in a nearby chair.
In amongst the steady grey-misting
freeze and drizzle, an occasional snowflake
slides upwards against gravity as a hard pellet of snow-ice
crashes down fast toward the forest floor. The world
has gone grey, indistinct, monochrome, dim.
The real snow will stay further north, as always.
At the cabin, far north and far higher than here,
winter arrived weeks ago, just as we were closing up,
blinding waves of snow squalls announcing the coming cold.
Going there is a kind of time travel, leaping
a month into the future in the fall, slipping
a month into the past in spring. I envision the lake
just starting to freeze now along the shore,
the last of the loons gone, bears settling in,
fisher cats, beavers, otters…thick-furred, fall-fattened,
barred owls quieter now, focused on sighting dark scurryings,
homing the radar disks of their faces
toward rustlings beneath snowbanks,
ravens, brash, loud, calling out, celebrating
their shining bright blackness in a world gone white.
Here near the shoreline of the Sound, rain freezes instantly,
the tangle of grey-black branches become glaze-white
as far as I can see, the breeze clicking them together
like countless clappers cupped in a grey-white bell of Connecticut sky.
Cold fingers of ice drum against the sides of the house.
The stove creaks. A cat stands, arches its back,
yawns, settles again. With no low sun, no long,
late-day, shadows, light merely leaks away,
draining into another long night, window panes gone black,
mirroring the yellow inside light.
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Took me a while. I got pulled into a weekend in Valle.
Delicioso !
What an evocative poem…it brought back many winter days scattered across my life on two continents. Reading your words of winter as I watch the California desert sun turn our Mount San Jacinto from blackness into a golden orange hew is quite a contrast! I’ll send you a picture and I’ll give greet our own desert ravens 🐦⬛ for you.