Half February
St. Valentine's. Winter is in us.
Hard to be faithful to summer's bulge and buzz
in such a medicine.
Hard to be heart-wrung
And sappy in what's unworkable and world-weary.
Hard to be halt and half-strung.
All of us, more or less, are unfaithful to something.
Solitude bears us away,
Approaches us in the form of a crescent, like love,
And bears us away
Into its icy comforting, our pain and our happiness.
I saw my soul like a little silkworm, diligently fed,
Spinning a thread with its little snout,
Anna Garcias wrote in the sixteenth century.
And who can doubt her,
Little silkworm in its nonbeing and nothingness.
Nothing like that in these parts these days --
The subject for today, down here, is the verb "to be,"
Snow falling, then sleet, then freezing rain,
St. Catherine nowhere in evidence, her left side opened, her heart removed,
All the world's noise, all its hubbub and din,
now chill and a glaze.
Appalachia
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