Winter

The night cuts me, it is so cold and severe, and so beautiful. The red berries, glowing in studded scatter on the bare branches, pierce my heart.

Oh lovely night, shrouding itself in a veil of snow, that glitters and is not soft; I walk your stilled paths, and people pass me, by the library, on the square, hustling in their square wool coats. The snow drops like stars across their hunched shoulders. I revel in my solitude, my singleness among people. Inside myself I am a great vaulted space, vast and exalted, and I turn up my face; the passers-by notice my odd glow, and lift their eyes to stare at me.

This singleness, this great white night, this simplicity of solid brick with the lamps glowing soft and gold inside; the people walking and leaving their squashed prints, the square at once ordinary and otherworldly.

I beseech you - don't speak to me, for my soul is as still and solitary as a blackpoll in migration, tiny in falling arc over the globe's great sphere, in its inertia of motion.

How still the night is!