Another Kind of Winter - by Anne Kellas
i
White snow day.
Some rain.
Shrags of sun.
Noun. Shrag (plural shrags). A twig cut from a tree.
Light.
Stray leaves and birds.
Slow spring it will be.
Silence. Black glass.
Mohair ice sparks
make a halo round a winter moon.
In space the world’s
a blue place.
ii
The rake stands idle, at an angle to the wooden fence, the plastic chairs lie blown
aside by last night’s gale. Two coffees. Some music to fill the gap between wanting
and having. The angels, invoked, are away on holiday. A bowl of winter oranges are
more alive on this table than all the electronic wires linking air to tree to sun. To
sun, to sun,
to sun.
iii
Do you want an image?
It is orange.
Sun.
Can you feel it?
Are you warm now?
And sated?
Does the orange taste sweet?
Is it deliciously juicy?
Ask the glass birds of Corsica
who glow violet in the dark
and flap their yellow wings
against the windowpane.
iv
Beautiful umbrellas of ideas go up, shut down.
Remembering the birdsong.
The song-slight poems.
Masters of nothing.
v
Night mind,
double-sided.
Neat though.
Coiled up,
like a cyclone
not yet unwound,
not yet blown through by wind.
In its centre, an eye for seeing sky.
How rich the hand grenade of memory.
All the sinews, if there are sinews
in the mind, held together by
thin cords of thought,
criss-cross like traffic, crazy.
Floating off across borders
with no expectations,
no islands or victories or passports,
just the flying mind,
free, and unfree,
holding its centre, but loosely,
like a storm about to break.
And when it does,
mind unravels itself,
one side sticky with memory,
the other holding onto the backing tape.
vi
The artist stepped out for a break in the middle of the cyclone and looked up
through the eye of the storm, clear of the rain clouds, looked sheer through the air
to the heart of the stars in the sky and the heart was beating in tune with the
universe, in time to Bach and Berlini, in time to Monteverdi and Tallis, but not in
time to the rain that was coming, thundering like a train, like a jet engine, like a
beast.
vii
Things swim in the night like fish,
through mind’s back alleys
black with the sludge of crossing
the barriers,
sliding in runnels, fast flowing,
out. Beyond sandbars,
the universe,
sea. ▼
Photo: Spider Light by Giles Hugo
This poem appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.