I don’t have the critical
apparatus in place to pry the references of this one open. That’s okay. I
suspect this is set in the time when B. had just left India, was in the
mountains of Spain before heading home to the US, looking back on what had
turned out to be a very difficult experience—illness, condescension and cultural
misunderstandings, shock at the extreme injustice of life for the poor in
India. But I’m not sure. It’s just as well to read it as an ungrounded
statement about loneliness and a kind of psycho-existential freeze, fogged with
a general regret, but I don’t think anymore that B. does too much of that. He’s
more often grounded in personal events. Perhaps it’s merely from a dream. No
matter. Here’s a poem about snow and regret on this clear and sunny, cold,
uneventful January day.
Snow
Cold
Nothing should ever happen
On a gray afternoon in JanuaryWhen distant traffic is muffled
By hillocks of round snow
The air crowded
With chaotic snowfall’s
Quiet filigree,
When overhead, a crow hunches
Like a gargoyle in towers
Of imbricated branches
Watching
High over the creeks
Which flow silently wavering
Beneath unbroken crusts
Of fanciful ice.
Ask me on days
Like this what I regret.
Snow cold never arrives
Like that chill rain
That fell last week
Whose wet digits crept
Up your cringing spine
Or like the sharp transparency
Of those ringing nights
When points of starlight
Seemed to needle your coat.
Snow cold warms
And that hunger
For solace, and forgiveness
That hunger for another go
Is like the patient hunger
Of a watching crow
Which pulses like curled regret
Beneath dark feathers
Beneath still white
That waits for a chance to hunt.
KZ
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