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
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]
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