Michael deBeyer

Plea of the Cold House

The house is a figment in a chronological line,
a line from a poem that falls to the floor, a line
in floorboards that follows to a knot, a knot
pressed rhythmically under a rocking chair’s heel.
I read here to pass the time. She ages in the other room.
Light motes through us both like a thinning wool,
a monochrome glare to the heart of patience.

I hear the music of wind-damming pines and of
the windowpane’s white vibrato, cup my hand
to my ear, and the heat from it slurs the blurring sleet,
grace, in a sense, our ticking clock. It is the sound
of a space that leaves us wholly in its meantime.
We must attend the meantime; the air, the dust, the light
of our travels from room to cold room, our worry there.

Silence of the Cold House

The clock in the kitchen mimics the sky’s light inquiry.
Light, never sharp, wears a glare down the leaden hall.
An arthritic dog paws the dull air below its threshold.

Every breath that, to the ear, is a crutched applewood
curled to a hush, is a silent wish, that draws the ceiling
nearer, and nearer still. One hears the gaps between

the ticking as footfalls. One hears the years the spaces
leave between each tree’s trim or fall as consolation.
Between again: the thud as either half of a cut log falls.

Between a gunshot that echoes around the valley’s bowl
and dusk, snow enters the frame. One can hear it here, lightly,
like a field mouse tunneling under the star’s blue hum.

Reflection, 6:00 pm

The newspaper today will not be as dark as the sky.
The sky, from the ground up, maple etched. The slow purple
of the weather. A day warmed by the friction of its passing.

A day of rabbits cautiously camouflaged above fall leaves;
the shudder in one’s eye that sets a hawk to flight. I mean

to compare this day to the one seen inside, behind a cabin’s
theatre window in whose warm light the day seems unable
to shake its oceanic grey, or dull the sheen, only grow sober.

In the warm light, a couple argues. Louder, their words accumulate,
catapult to the point of blind indecision, paining through

the cabin’s log walls. At the end, a newspaper is grabbed, hoisted
and thrown. Each broad sheet, each shard, floats gracefully, meted
in the rub of heavy air and the silence it leaves in its slipstream.

It has become so dark, neither sees past the room’s reflection
to the open talons and the reduction of sound in a rabbit’s scream.

Study

A crow in the noon sun
has the look of charred fencepost

pointing toward the grounding
of flight. Where its wings overlap:

at the mere thought, clouds gather.
Branches snap from oaks in distant forests

and, yes, you are able to hear them.
This, walking towards you,

bigger, bluer than before,
and the beauty of it terrifies.

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