Winter Dancer

  Winter Dancer

The sun has drawn its arc four times
across the circle of the year,
transcribed its tangent on the bow,
and now the bow is laid aside, the music stops.

I wake, and see ahead a season without change,
a winter free of spring's apologies--the old
embarrassment of summer lies--an Amundson
of mind who shakes his shaggy coat
and makes a blizzard out of June.  

His eyes glitter under frozen brows; 
He smiles, and ice clouds wrap his shoulders
like a mountain in a Himalayan storm.

I know this man, have seen his face,
and not in dreams. His hands are small
and strong like mine; the wind blows brittle
at their finger tips, and yet
a supple music lends his movement 

Grace, an ease as when the mind
remembers what the body's lost,
as when an old dancer on a winter day
stops, stiff and cold beneath a snow bent tree, 
and hears the dance well up within, and motionless,

Rises like a child's song
into a season of its own creating.

I am the child singing,
out of fear for his old bones,
I sing. He takes my hand
as though it were his own and wraps
me in his great coat. I sing,
and still unmoving as the winter tree above,
he teaches me his dance--our foolish bodies
clinging one to one.