John Timpane
WINTER BEFORELIGHT
Winter beforelight.
…Lamp by lamp the house of night
shuts. Dawn enlarges;
a father turns off the lights,
…loves each room for lives it holds.
On the railing of
…the bridge across the creek, wind
and sunfire scour, sculpt
snow into equidistant
…amygdaloid ivories.
Footprints in the snow:
…in each footprint lies a leaf,
in each leaf the light.
First fell the light, then snow, then
…the footstep, then leaf, then light.
Morning frost remains
…only where shadows fall. Let
the sun rise enough
to warm, let my shadow with-
…draw, let your frost disappear.
False spring: the pond thaws
…at the edges, leaving a
pond-shaped heart of ice.
The chapped corners of my mouth
…attest to advancing age.
In the fremitus/
…crepitus asthma-winter,
this flensing wind, truth-
fullness, writing writing wri-
…ting writing all the damn times.
Blazing in the night,
…fiery feather cirrus,
sword dividing the
winter sky, ice-auroras
…inflamed by backlighting moon.
Hard light without heat.
…Heat without light is harder,
consumption in the
midst of nothing, leaving
…the one who burns in darkness.
for Rocky, our golden Lab:
With his heat—as he
…snuffles, fails to recall, nos-
es into ever-
y damn thing—the snow cradled
…between Rocky’s shoulders melts.
Snowfall muffles the world
…of hunters and hunted. Starved
hawks faint, fall from pines.
In silence’s enclosure
owls moan, kings of loneliness.
On a wind-ripped night
…bells at a railroad crossing
swinge back and forth:
what passes in darkness, what
…sounds long after there is need.
Where fireflies glowed, stars
…remain, but they are frost. Are
these the firefly souls?
When frost is what I am, will
…you remember me as fire?
After snowfall the field
…is a book of quest and flight,
trots, treads … ellipses,
signatures of the dragged tail.
A new snowfall: erasure.
John Timpane is the Books and Fine Arts Editor/Writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly.com. His work has appeared in Sequoia, The Fox Chase Review, Apiary, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Review of Books, The Rathalla Review, Per Contra, Vocabula Review, and elsewhere. Among his books is a chapbook, Burning Bush (Judith Fitzgerald/Cranberry Tree, 2010). His poem “In a Dry Month” appears in Issue No. 1 of Cleaver and his poem “A Cricket in Washington Square Park” appears in Issue 14. He is the spouse of Maria-Christina Keller. They live in New Jersey.
Image credit: Aaron Burden on Unsplash. John’s headshot courtesy of Jessica Griffin/Philadelphia Inquirer
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #16.
