The Last Station

The woods in winter fill with birds:

a clash of sparrows, jackdaws,

jays that flip among the shaggy boughs.

I step through brush, unharmed,

its brittle gauze of leafless branches

that can twig your eyes and make you bleed.

In the wind above the red Norwegian pines

a ragged crow waits, lazily

aloft, a cold eye hung

and hard as diamond in the ice blue sky.

Last summer, in a field nearby,

I saw that crow, its sharp beak

working on a fresh-dead dog. I watched them

lift off, veer into these woods

for some dark feast, black crow and dog.

What’s moldering beneath this crusty snow?

I put my ear down by a stream

to hear the gargling water underground,

lost syllables, lost tales, alive

beneath the ice. Whatever we can love

stays warm inside us, even when

we lose the name of life,

when sooty shadows lengthen on our spines,

when birds above us are the only song

we’ll hear again. I walk across

the frozen lid of water, where it sags

but doesn’t give. The world’s my home still,

even though I’ve got less days to count

than once, when dreaming I could fly,

I climbed a tree and leaped into the wind

with sleeves air-filled. Ah, falling

into soft snow, falling from a height I knew

would matter only if I hit a rock or stump…

I put my lips against an icy root,

where sap is running though it’s not yet spring.

It’s warm in winter,

as my mouth fills with dry snow, sweet-

sticky bark. I bend to pray:

Lord, let me know you as I know these woods,

Zasyeka’s warm and winter fluttering,

blue wings and black, the taste and tastelessness

of sappy snow, the flicker of these moods.