Or when I go into the room and close my door
It is the hour for decisions and I am going to take a little nap:
"Okay!" says the driver.
Barbara Guest
IN WINTER TREES
At the end of the linked chain of prosperity,
Out of the florist's of possibility, after the ball in the backyard
Has bounced away from the boy in bed, I come
To the end of a dream in the evergreen cribs of a wood,
And there, let my limbs stretch to the blood's last link.
There, past the green in which they grew, are the trees
The winter takes as the year's standard soldiers' heads;
The hatless of time
In the arms and legs of their knowing
And the prison of their mind. All that they ever did
Left like pen-wipings on a writing pad,
The sleeves of the impression the green black blades have made–
That
is
the motion of experience and the shadow's wound
That the knife cannot fulfill until the gray surgeons bald
In the knowledge that their cutting killed; the youthful shoots
That bloomed with arms and legs for limbs are now the trunks
Of covered holes we know as scars; these are the windows
Against which sweat gathers in winter sleep
And runs to join the chain that moves beneath the limbs:
How, in a wood, all things are once again possible.
CONDEMNED
In tumbrils rumbling over cobblestones
They, in hempen garments, might have seen
Pictures out of the past, the dungeons, thrones,
Theodore Holmes
The parade of years that were, or might have been;
