When you walk out in it (Chekhov) When you walk out in it you know you need to stand in the snow like this so everything will become clear to you just like this one is or will be like each branch turning to find its way in out of the cold inner air shuttered in the white pale skin of the arm and inside the deep set center of the leg against the low and mighty turning of the ground. When you walk out into the snow like that to stand like this you need to know you can’t do it this way forever. Not like that. You need to know how every winter birch is only part of what it once was here a thousand years ago, the way millions of us have built it up out of old low tombs in just that way to reach the most central places of this waiting fall of snow that is not the palest skin, but whole and breathing in and out like this is, just like you are, even more alive than you are. When you go out into the snow like this bring your shoes back in with you so you can hold them up like that, the way white skies hold themselves over pale new snow. You don’t see it quite that way do you but it’s here. You knew it could have been just like this the moment you came out to stand like that inside this frozen radiant perfect movement of two white winter birches. ----------------------------------------- the way to some birches Are these the best birches you get going down to the barn on a snowy clouded-up winter afternoon, taking branches up to that grey-blue sky so it mirrors the breaks of the trunk-paper turning? How that branch there twists and turns its way up to the light in the daylight in or out, and decides itself up or away from the light? How does it do it, old man! You don’t know. You just use rules. Don’t answer me youngster either, you don’t know. When the light turned leaf can call its trembling down like a trumpet shimmered from its ancient branch in autumn, don’t answer me either, husband and father. Young lovely woman, there is no beauty in all this world like the way thy beauty moves in you. * Walk out past a couple of lonely birches out there waiting in the lane going out at the springhouse hard by the woods on a snowy evening after all the afternoon is gone. They’ve set it up so we leave them there, patient but unguarded, maybe wholly invisible to us walking by in our boots: We have our scarves on when we turn in, anxious to get home and get dry; we hold our cheeks, and blow steam into our hands, and love comes, and then hate, and we keep on going in this deep snow. Birches.

Poetry by William F. Buford Copyright © 2004-2007 William F. Buford. All Rights Reserved.