Ice is a double-edged knife
on the surface of the pond - a long, thin sharpness cutting this way and that. The temperature is in the mid-twenties, sky this morning and a rosy horizon all around.
*
The ice
forms at
night -Shaped by
wind and
shadowAnd the cold,
the cold
starlight.
*
You want to give; you get slapped; you want to give some more. Why do we give away even when it hurts. Cut off the head of a rattle snake, I've been told, it will still bite until sundown. We still give even into the darkness. Is that part of what makes us human? I'd like to believe we are better than we sometimes appear.
Yesterday as M. and I walked in the country we found a horned owl dead in the driveway to a cemetery. It had been hit by a car, I suppose, and had been dead long enough to be frozen stiff. One wide eye stared at an empty sky. The owl lay in stillness, not seeing the stillness. Everything that was owl becomes the earth.
A chill wind blows from south to north. Bright sunlight from east to west. I leave home, I have to drive to work. The poles of everything.
Some of the owl becomes memory, until the watching human joins the rest of the owl in earth.
Posted by: poor_mad_peter | December 10, 2007 at 06:15 AM
Ah, Peter, we all become the earth, don't we? The earth, or star dust....
Posted by: Tom Montag | December 10, 2007 at 06:43 AM