One of these days

The door shudders at the hinges, and
overhead the pale thumbnail moon glows,
matches the weeks-old snow--
and my feet trample through it like it fell
just last night and stuck there,
across the church parking lot--and there even,
spread out in a moonlight quilt over our bare backyard,
hiding the dormant lawn and the apple tree's rising roots,
the frozen wooden garden boxes strapped with rusted braces,
the little tin shed and the damp dresser
with the missing leg and the loose drawers,
the old cobwebbed lawnmower and its dull, exposed blades.
Overhead the cable wires droop down heavy with white
and reach for the dark solid soil hidden under
our field of winter.
It knows just about everything, this omniscient season does,
it squeezes through every crevice and permeates the world wide
with its frost and taste of cold.

I walk past the blue and black trash bins
(through the little rickety steel gate that overgrows
with olive-colored vines in the summer).
The neighbors' light is on;
the baby cries and I watch through the fogged kitchen window
as his mother shoulders him up,
wraps him in his yellow-and-white-striped blanket
and hefts him high. She smiles and coos, walks
to calm him, to protect him from the
deep hibernation outside.
Something steams in a shiny pot on the burner,
and his father eats dinner on a brown leather easy chair
in front of the television screen,
flickering sports highlights.

So I lay down out back there under the naked apple tree,
all wet and cold and bare, stiffening in that windless clear,
watching the line of icicles that parade across the eaves
single file like deep translucent roots of ice
or clear January speartips made by the trickling warmth
of the slow southern sun in the daytime.
They are bent downward bound for the street,
bound to break loose one of these days.

I want my arms and legs to just freeze up
and stop being me, so I can quit feeling cold
and feel something else for a change,
something that takes more than sensation
or season or temperature.
Something crying like a fetus at the walls of the womb.
--Let me out.
--Let me out!
--Let me in.

I am ready to begin.