quickly, in silence, like stolen kisses

I will go back to that silent evening 

when we lay together and talked in low, silent voices, 

while outside slow lumps of soft snow 

fell, hushing as they got near the ground, 

with a fire in the room, in which centuries 

of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up, 

without a crackle, into morning light. 

Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep. 

When we got home we turned and looked back 

at our tracks, where they lie still across the land

of our twining, twining out of the woods, 

where the branches we brushed against let fall 

puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence, 

like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch 

among the trees, which is the sound that dies 

inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge 

hits it off center telling everything inside 

it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up 

but without arms, and so obviously lonesome, 

and yet also—how could we know this?—happy! 

in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow, 

not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing 

not to meet until heaven, but here and there 

making stomped, slubby kissing-knots in the snow, 

our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch. 

Everything that happens here—even in the cold air

the chick when at last grown old dee dee dees

through—is really little more, if even that,

than a scratch, too.  Words, in our mouths, 

are almost ready, already, to bandage the one 

whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when 

we will lose each other, scratches scratches scratches 

from this moment to that. Then I will go back 

to that silent evening, when the past just managed 

to cross into the future, if just by a trace,
and the light 

that lives inside the overlap doubles and shines 

through the dark the sparkling that heavens the earth. 

Listen to it here

 

[Galway Kinnell {1927-2014} 'That Silent Evening", from 3 Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; and The Past]