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| Robert Strong Woodward |
Ice
Her house is armed to the teeth. Icicles bristle
above my head as I shiver at her door.
One lackadaisical arrow drops.
She's locked in behind winter's
glassy portcullis.
The river's a white road now. As I set foot it groans
as if under a hundred trundling cartwheels.
A crack zigzags across the surface
and I am plunged through the shell
into slush-water.
Oat-husks and thistles, a crop of frost in the snowfields.
There is a clear glue hardening on my walls,
clutching my fingertip like birdlime.
From now on nothing will move
but the skidding wind.
Matthew Francis
fr. The Green Month: Poems After Daffydd ap Gwilym
He could've said,
"It was cold out, and an icicle nearly brained me while I was waiting for Alice to answer the door. The river is frozen although I went through in one spot and got my feet wet."
He could've made the complaint,
"The damp on my walls is turned to ice now, and the wind never stops."
And be true, accurate, even precise.
Instead, he gives us other facets of those same qualities.
Instead, he chooses words which call up a sense of of old chivalry, of besieged castles, he gives us a glimpse of the possible story he (and we with him) is part of, or partaking of.
He takes us on a walk, but notices that there are more paths than one. The landscape he lives in makes new ways out of itself - the river becomes a way.
And there are harvests to be gathered from what is not usually a source of food.
Weathers, landscapes, objects - all these have different facets when held up to the light, when examined, tasted, tried. All these are transfigured by the eye that sees their possibles, and that gives the possibles words.
The poet is not "creating", he is revealing, he is showing the realities which are already there.
They are all there!
Here!
