Winter V - the Light the Dark

Braving the cold air For the moment it takes To stroll to the end of my driveway Wearing but a wool sweater I bow To the mid-afternoon Picking up A popsicle of morning bound newspaper Straightening up To the miles and miles of blue sky As if I am the stranded man Under one palm tree on the one island Captioned in a New Yorker cartoon Hand on my hip The other holding a salute Surveying the exquisite sheet of sunlight Snapped over this frozen ocean of white Pretending to believe it’s a trick on the eye To see a picket fence of tree trunk shadows and candy stripes Flattened to the snow Disavowing all property lines As the caw caw caw of a crow Crackles a warning hello His black body a shark eye Staring sideways From the skull of a stoic Oak Down to me Then back to the snow And a trail of stitched holes Melting and gaping from the feign of heat Evolved From the paws of an overnight tomcat To that of a deer To now The plucked boots of a man. What stranger would stomp in circles Around my house and under a reading lamp Like this? Searching for meaning in day-old headlines? But for a shadow Let loose from his own wolf body Tearing from what blocks the sun Temporarily born from the dark to the light To come and go as all in one.