Winter Scenes

Snow settles,
I am restless.
Fires fragment,
in winter afternoons.
The snow breaks up,
reveals rare earth again.
'Green thoughts,
in a green shade'
A forgetful heart,
that is mirror to itself.
A sigh on the dark glass.
Is it me, or you?
---b.

'Cassiel's Lament'

And we, spectators always, everywhere
Looking at, never out of, everything
It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.

When the child was a child he looked at the first breath of winter frost and danced with delight; and now, he worries about how to keep warm.
When the child was a child he looked at the frozen puddle, its cracks, and thought of a mirror broken by the weight of the world's beauty; and now, he sees only his own grotesque image.

Note: Today a man walked in the deserted streets and thought he was walking in a forest. His head turned at an angle to greet a stray dog, and he thought to himself, 'how much he looks like me'. Is he the first one to enter this wood or the last one to leave it? As he traces the footprints in the snow he thinks to himself: have I chosen the wrong path... again?
The leaves have curled up on themselves, turning their faces away from the world. A few plastic bags lay strewn in the school yard-abandoned and forgotten.

Outside a restaurant, a taxi driver says to a Russian waitress: I want to marry you darlin'. She takes pity on him. I am married but you can be my lover. He replies, swooning, 'I'd love to be your lover, petal.'

Today, a man on the central line thinks: the failure of the world is the inability to look at the world and to be seen by it in the right way.

Yet still from Eden springs the root

As clean as on the starting day.

Time takes the foliage and the fruit

And burns the archetypal leaf

To shapes of terror and of grief

Scattered along the winter way.

But famished field and blackened tree

Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity

Bloom in these darkened fields alone.

What had Eden ever to say

Of hope and faith and pity and love

Until was buried all its day

And memory found its treasure trove?

Strange blessings never in Paradise

Fall from these beclouded skies.

---Edwin Muir

Medusa's Eyes

The eyes did not fail.
They believed, even from a distance.
It was the heart that was unfaithful,
fluttering like a tattered banner in the wind.
To be lost in the soul of the sea ,
or bound by your green vision.

Why lament?

My heart has fallen like a star.

Then it was fire.
Now it is stone.

---b.