Dare Again Thoreau

"In winter it darkens the moment lunch is over.
It's hard then to tell starving men from sated.
A yawn keeps a phrase from leaving its cozy lair."
       – Brodsky, "Eclogue IV: Winter"









                                                                     I

In the bridge by winter I can find a light.
It might not be the glacial lake to the south,
all a broad desert of white diadem and snow flight
or an urban river snaking through apartment growth,
but a vision of passing from one life overcome
then onto the next as if a banded and magical sum,

by mid-day, along the same street, fluffed snow
building its powdery enamel does remind me
of our own midwestern version of a Jeta Grove.
There Buddha learned to sit and expunge grief;
where my mind disattaches from me, this gift
that is a bridge to peace, my soul-toward shift.