Читать книгу Doubtful Harbor - Idris Anderson - Страница 13

Red Oaks

I wake to trees in a window

or rather four windows

like a Japanese screen,

each panel a version

of a New Hampshire wood.

It’s winter white under the trees,

a ground like crumpled silk

or parchment flecked

with fibers of rag—

the litter of stump and stone.

And though morning is not brilliant

and there is no sound and nothing

is moving, I know

under the mounds of soft snow

are rivulets of melt refrozen,

layers of hard black leaves,

white roots growing

quietly, quietly.

A few stiff leaves cling,

the color of grocery-bag paper.

The subject is trees—

tall-slender or scrub-bent,

brown-gray against

white sky. A heavy stroke

across the four windows—

a hardwood fallen,

rotted orange, its bark

curled sheets sloughed off,

its thick stump splintered,

the red blond of raw red oak.

To cold light I wake

empty of what I was;

and sure of nothing

but windows and oaks,

and contented almost

to be contented

in contemplation

of oriental perspective—

the higher up each pane

the deeper the wood,

patches of snow becoming

patches of white sky—

I meditate upon

such distinctions

and indistinctions.