find the light a comfort.
Peace. The earth turns
against all living, in the end.
And when mind has not outraged
itself against its nature,
they die and become the place
they lived in. Peace to the bones
that walk in the sun toward death,
for they will come to it soon enough.
Let the phoebes return in spring
and build their nest of moss
in the porch rafters,
and in autumn let them depart.
Let the garden be planted,
and let the frost come.
Peace to the porch and the garden.
Peace to the man in the window.

20.

In the early morning dark
he dreamed of the spring woodsflowers
standing in the ground,
dark yet under the leaves and under
the bare cold branches.
But in his dream he knew their way
was prepared, and in their time
they would rise up joyful.
And though he had dreamed earlier
of strife, his sleep became peaceful.
He said: If we, who have killed
our brothers and hated ourselves,
are made in the image of God,
then surely the bloodroot,
wild phlox, trillium and mayapple
are more truly made
in God’s image, for they have desired
to be no more than they are,
and they have spared each other.
Their future
is undiminished by their past.
Let me, he said in his dream,
become always less a soldier
and more a man,
for what is unopened in the ground
is pledged to peace.
When he woke and went out
a flock of wild ducks that had fed
on the river while he slept
flew off in fear of him.
And he walked, manly, into the new day.
He came to his window
where he sat and looked out,
the earth before him, blessed
by his dream of peace,
bad history behind him.

21.

He has known a tunnel
through the falling snow
that brought him back at dark
and nearly killed him on the way,
the road white as the sky
and the snow piling.
Mortality crept up close
in the darkness round his eyes.
He felt his death’s wrenched avatars
lying like silent animals
along the ditch. He thought
of his wife, his supper and his bed,
and kept on, and made it.
Now he sits at the window
again, the country hard and bright
in this winter’s coldest morning.
The river, unfrozen still,
gives off a breath of smoke
that flows upstream with the wind.
Behind him that burrow
along the wild road
grows certain in his mind,
leading here, surely. It has arrived
at the window, and is clarified.
Now he has learned another way
he can come here. Luck
taught him, and desire.
The snow lies under the woods
and February is ending.
Far off, another way, he hears
the flute of spring,
an old-style traveler,
wandering through the trees.

22.

Still sleeping, he heard
the phoebe call, and woke to it,
and winter passed out of his mind.
The bird, in the high branches
above the road-culvert mouth,
sang to what was sleeping,
two notes, clear and
harsh. The stream came,
full-voiced, down the rocks
out of the woods. The wood ducks
have come back to nest
in the old hollow sycamore.
The window has changed, no longer
remembering, but waiting.

23.