Cold Poem
Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.
I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe
that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.
Mary Oliver
I had been thinking about the giving up of dreams in late middle age and the possibility of giving them a decent burial complete with eloquent eulogy.
Tonight, England is cold and my apartment is cold and Google threw up this poem about cold, or the winter season of our lives, or growing older. It is in the winter of our lives, that we think hard about what we really want and in strange way, feed on dreams of our youth. That is an alternative metaphor to a burial. Dreams of our youth are stored in the barn as fodder to be consumed before summer comes around again with a new harvest?