COURTYARD IN WINTER

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

Slowly, I push back the door.
After long absence, old habits
Are painfully revived, those disciplines
Which enable us to survive,
To keep a minimal fury alive
While flake by faltering flake

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

Along the courtyard, the boss
Of each cobblestone is rimmed
In white, the winter’s weight
Pressing, like a silver shield,
On all the small plots of earth,
Inert in their living death as

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

Seized in a giant fist of frost,
The grounded planes at London Airport,
Mallarmé swans, trapped in ice.
The friend whom I have just left
Will be dead a year from now
Through her own fault while

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

Or smothered by some glacial truth?
Thirty years ago, I learnt to reach
Across the rusting hoops of steel
That bound our greening water barrel
To save the living water beneath
The hardening crust of ice before

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

But despair has a deeper crust.
In all our hours together, l never
Managed to ease the single hurt
That edged her toward her death;
Never reached through her loneliness
To save a trust, chilled after

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

I plunged through snowdrifts
Once, above our home, to carry
A telegram to a mountain farm.
Fearful but inviting, they waved
Me to warm myself at the flaring
Hearth before I faced again where

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

The news l brought was sadness.
In a far city, someone of their name
Was dying. The track of foxes,
Wild birds as I climbed down
Seemed to form a secret writing
Minute but frail as life when

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

Sometimes, I know that message.
There is a disease called snow sickness;
The glare from the bright god,
The earth’s reply. As if that
Ceaseless, glittering light was
All the truth we’d left after

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

So, before dawn, comfort fails.
I imagine her end, in some sad
Bed-sitting-room, the steady hiss
Of the gas more welcome than an
Act of friendship, the protective
Oblivion of a lover’s caress if

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

In the canyon of the street
The pale snow clouds hesitate,
Turning to slush almost before
They cross the firm canvas of
The street stalls, the bustle
Of a sweeper’s brush after

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

The walls are spectral, white,
All the trees black-ribbed, bare.
Only veins of ivy, the sturdy
Laurel with its drooping leaves,
Its scant red berries, survive
To form a winter wreath as

Snow curls in on the cold wind.

What solace but endurance, kindness?
Against her choice, l claim
That nothing dies, that even from
Such bitter failure memory grows;
The snowflake’s structure, fragile
But intricate as the rose when

Snow curls in on the cold wind.