That's a sort of an old poem.
And I'll read one more old poem that
will be-- both of these will be in my first book.
This is called Women With Children With Winter.
And it's partly a memory of seeing children in snow suits
when I lived in the country.
In New England, going off on the school buses and playing,
and on those saucer things, going down
hillsides and everything.
It isn't really about that, but it
was that picture of all the different bright colors
on a white surface that I guess started this poem.
Women With Children With Winter, the individual flakes
precise as windows into conscience
are ignored for a total sense of softening.
Our houses in the hills, with their stiff black trees,
rising behind all the scattered colors of children in the snow.
So we think of interiors as contour,
as a lake that grows muscular and dark
with bending in the night.
This last expression of a day, says
the incurable past was not cruel but an exciting in between.
A scarlet weather, we muffle the exactness of the way
we drag our children into heavy clothes for entering winter.
We live with this hazy version of ourselves,
as charming figures turning down the sheets,
but wish we were perfectly beautiful as often
the children are in sleep.
Their startling scent is remote and sexual,
like the golden breasts dreamed of by a man in his chair.
The slow bodies pulling back and out of breath,
escape the keeping of it.
The lunar form of what we haven't learned, but thought we
had in memory.
When like now, last winter was filled with snow
and revolving silhouettes.