Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Jim Thatcher of Yarmouth. His most recent book is “Lesser Eternities” published by Deerbrook Editions.
Ice Night
By Jim Thatcher
On the first full night of astronomical Spring
Winter slept its deepest sleep,
Pregnant, heavy, glittering in its stillness
Under the great green vault of dancing Borealis.
A night so cold the mind withdrew into omniscience
And opened with the world outside.
Fur drew deeper in its lairs,
Neither owl nor fox could hunt,
And in the moonless, starlit brilliance
Deer stood struck through somnolent hours,
Their breath a ghostly silent sparkling fog.
Time itself seemed frozen into Presence —
An energy congealed, and taut with brittle tension.
No wind blew and no thing moved,
And only sound seemed living:
Old pines cracked like pistols in the woods, and
On the lakes the pressure of the ice reached crystal mass
To split against itself
In lightning fissures cracking out
In cannonades across the compass of the dark,
To echo through the forests
And twang in pinging soundings
Down the muffled depths below,
Where lake trout sought the warmth of deeper waters,
To wait the rising-sooner dawns and dream
The fiery arch of summer’s hall.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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