West Wind, XI.

Now only the humorous shadows that the moon
makes, playing the corners of furniture, flung and
dropped clothing, the backs of books, the architecture
of electronics, and so on. The bed that level and soft
rise is empty. We are gone.

So, say that dreams, possibilities, emotions, while we
are gone from the house, take shape. Say there are
thirty at least, one to represent each year, and more
leaning in the doorway between the slope of the beach
and the pale walls of the rooms, just moon-gazing for
a moment or two, before they come into that starry
garden, our house at night.

Some of those thirty are as awkward as children,
romping and gripping. Others have become birds,
clouds, trees dipping their heart-shaped leaves, that
long song. Here and there a face that won’t trans-
form—eyes of stone, expressions of pettiness and
sulk. And now it is winter, and in the black air
the snow is falling in its own sweet leisure, for its
own reasons. And now the snow has deepened, and
created form: two white ponies. How they gallop in
the waves. How they steam, and turn to look for
each other. How they love the clouds and the tender,
long grass and the horizons and the hills. How they
nuzzle, how they nicker, how they reach down, at the
unclosable spring in the notch of the pasture, to be
replenished.