After Midnight
A poem. "A counter-melody is playing..."
Between midnight and three
I wake—the quiet’s deeper than before.
Out the window, a mold of quiet’s grown
Across the grass and on the woodshed door.
First snow, still nearly rain,
As thick as rags soaked in a frigid well,
Has clasped albino shadows to each tree
And made our yard a field in Asphodel.
But over this white theme
A counter-melody is playing soft
And getting louder: overtones of sheen,
Refracted headlights in the maple’s croft.
I am as alien here
As desert snow, agog at all this stuff
Still quite itself, yet now somehow transposed,
As if creation hadn’t been enough.