In the kitchen of the old house, late,
I was making some coffee
and I day-dreamed sleepily of old friends.
Then the dream turned. I waited.
I walked alone all day in the town
where I was born. It was cold,
a Saturday in January
when nothing happens. The streets
changed as the sky grew dark around me.
The lamps in the small houses
had tassels on them, and the black cars
at the curb were old and square.
A ragman passed with his horse, their breaths
blooming like white peonies,
when I turned into a darker street
and I recognized the house
from snapshots. I felt as separate
as if the city and the house
were closed inside a globe which I shook
to make it snow. No sooner
did I think of snow, but snow started
to fill the heavy darkness
around me. It reflected the glare
of the streetlight as it fell
melting on the warmth of the sidewalk
and frozen on frozen grass.
Then I heard out of the dark the sound
of steps on the bare cement
in a familiar rhythm. Under
the streetlight, bent to the snow,
hatless, younger than I, so young that
I was not born, my father
walked home to his bride and his supper.
A shout gathered inside me
like a cold wind, to break the rhythm,
to keep him from entering
that heavy door—but I stood under
a tree, closed in by the snow,
and did not shout, to tell what happened
in twenty years, in winter,
when his early death grew inside him
like snow piling on the grass.
He opened the door and met the young
woman who waited for him.
The Footsteps
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