Winter Comes in Earnest
Winter comes in earnest tonight—cold below zero
and gusts that pull trees up, snap power lines.
The autumn meadow outside the window fades to a smear
of darkness. In the night, a man awakes to find the cold
invades the bedroom from the outer rooms and frost
turning his windows to sheets of ice. A power failure.
In pitch darkness, the man fumbles for a flashlight,
dresses by bungling and finger touch and enters the gale
across iced ground to the woodpile in the shed, a spark
of human consciousness carried by leg and foot, by instinct
over frozen ground through darkness and wind to survive
to find warmth for heart and lung and mind in fire.
He is promised this condition in the news for three more days
before the arctic threat is diverted by the jet stream that coils
above him in the darkness while he crosses the frozen yard.
He wonders how very much we think we know of these
natural cosmic forces—jet streams, black holes, expanding
universes while he follows a flashlight beam through the dark.
It’s a trial by wind and cold. Not a hundred yards from here
his neighbor’s dying. The man’s perishing too, every day, yet he makes
his effort to gather wood and build a fire to keep himself alive,
alive another night, another day. To what purpose all this fuss?
A night like this with power failed, crossing a yard in darkness?
The moment leads him back a while, a laconic thought of simpler times,
then he finds the woodpile in the darkness and fumbles to gather
an armload of logs and stumbles back across the yard into the house.
In the interior dark, his match flares, flames build in the fireplace
into a yellow roar. Darkness all around, shadows on the wall twist
and bend. He pulls a couch to the edge of heat, lays down, blanket
to his ears, and tries to sleep in a night of storm, a world asleep.
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George Thomas, Navy veteran and retired machinist, earned an MFA at Eastern Washington University. He has founded and/or co-founded and edited three literary magazines: Willow Springs, Heliotrope (not the current one), and George & Mertie’s Place. He’s previously published in Anglo-Welsh Review, Work Literary Magazine, Willow Springs, Bellowing Ark, Crab Creek Review, Kestrel, and North Dakota Quarterly to name a few. A story has just appeared in Flora Fiction, and another will soon appear in Chiron Review.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 