A note—
E, D, C♯—
held, not going anywhere.
The rose at the window—
petal and spiral,
not in stages.
The notes fall like sand—
broken,
and whole.
Tag: contemplative poetry
Night Reading
The poem finally opened itself:
after readings enough, I saw
how the line broke, why
that word and not another.
The pleasure—self forgotten
in attending, briefly lodged
in someone else’s precision,
language doing its work.
Book to shelf. Poem to page.
The body turns to its ablutions:
water, soap, the day undone.
I glance up at the mirror—
it will not hold image.
Water still running. My hands, still wet, suspended.
The book already distant on its shelf,
the lines loosening, unheld.
The Year Begins Again
The year begins again, before we ask,
arriving as the light does—simply so.
We do not grieve what has passed.
Too few the days, the weeks, the months, the years
still allotted to our keeping.
We do not hold them, nor pretend to save;
we meet the hour as it comes, unadorned,
and give it back in care, as best we can.
Lux Crescens
The light returns in fractions—
a minute portioned back today, another
tomorrow. I keep the count,
though clouds obscure the evidence:
three minutes banked by New Year’s,
another half-minute folded in,
five more by Epiphany.
The cold arrives in earnest now:
lake effect, the wind that finds
every weakness in the house’s skin.
But the light grows. The sun
keeps its promise without display,
deposits made, retained, compounded.
I watch for five fifteen, for when
darkness once took the day entire.
Now it hesitates. Now it waits.
February measures what accumulates:
an hour restored, perhaps more.
Afternoon lengthens itself,
light touching the sun room wall
at angles I had forgotten. Still
the snow, still the grey insistence
of overcast—but something
fundamental has shifted.
The sun climbs higher, stays longer,
asks nothing in return. This is not
spring—spring lies, breaks its word
too often to be trusted. This is
mathematics, planetary tilt,
the faithful working of the world’s
ancient machinery.
I am owed nothing.
I receive these minutes anyway.
March brings the balance: day and night
held even, aequinoctium.
The light has kept its promise
minute by minute, fraction
by fraction, until the ledger clears.
Not triumph—the cold can still
return, and will—but equipoise:
that moment of level standing
before the light tips into majority.
I have done nothing to earn this
except continue, except persist
through diminishment, watching
the slow reversal, the patient return.
The light grows still.
The light keeps growing.
The promise is not finished.
Icy Stars
Icy stars—
points of ancient fire made brittle by distance,
as though the heavens themselves had entered winter.
They do not blaze; they prick.
They hang, hard and lucid, in a silence sharpened by cold.
Such stars feel less like promises than reckonings.
Their light arrives stripped of warmth,
having crossed immensities where heat was spent long ago.
What reaches the eye is endurance, not comfort—
illumination without mercy.
In winter they seem closer,
because the air has been scoured clean of softness.
Each star stands alone, exact, unblurred,
the sky insisting on precision,
on the refusal of haze, metaphor, or excuse.
Indeed—stars resemble snowflakes.
Each one discrete,
each one sharp with its own geometry,
no two quite alike,
yet all governed by the same severe order.
They fall not downward but inward,
settling upon the mind rather than the ground.
They do not melt; they persist.
What snow does to the earth—
muting, clarifying, equalizing—
stars do to thought.
Yet they are dissimilar in temperament—decisively so.
The star, for all its pinprick stillness to the eye,
is violence without pause:
fusion, a steady hammer at its core,
plasma boiling and convecting within its bounds,
only to be held together by gravity’s unrelenting fist.
Its light is not calm but coerced—
order wrested from perpetual revolt.
The snowflake, by contrast, is obedience incarnate.
It forms in surrender to temperature, pressure, and time,
each facet answering silently to law.
Nothing churns; nothing rebels.
Structure blooms where energy dissipates,
an architecture born not of struggle but of yielding.
And yet—what appears as opposition resolves into fidelity:
both answering to temperature, to nature, to law.
Not submission,
but staying true
to what is given,
to what may not be otherwise.
The star obeys by burning.
Given mass and pressure, it cannot do otherwise.
Fusion is not choice but consequence,
law pressed hard upon matter
until light is forced into being.
Its turbulence is not rebellion
but endurance under extremes.
The snowflake obeys by forming.
Lowered heat, suspended vapor,
the slightest allowance of stillness—
and geometry appears.
No facet decides;
each angle arrives as it must.
Thus neither star nor snowflake is free,
and yet both are exact.
They do not err,
because they do not aspire.
They enact what must be—
and leave us to consider
what it means to call that perfection.
Northcoast Antiquarian 