Frost at Midnight

He has been reading Frost at midnight,
turning dogs-ear pages with his hand,
seeking the longer poems, less well known
than those short bits, so much
misunderstood by teachers as to be
thrown at school children year by year
as something not mixed with evil, and not speaking
foremost of pain, self-loathing, and of fear. Some small sound
not in the fireplace brings his chin up sharp.
Rising from the comfortable chair,
he makes rounds, checking every room.
None stirring; only a landscape of dreams
above each head, filled with kinds of longing,
rehashings of the day's dismays. Turning
from interior ghosts to exterior,
he steps to the largest window, and lifts
the paisley bedsheet that serves for curtain
there. Moonlight, and another kind of frost,
such as another poet loved. Finding his clogs,
he tips out into shadow beneath the moon.
Beyond, rubbing against lilacs and a half dead
apple tree, his neighbor's cows. He goes to them,
offering blandly a hand of frost-white grass,
and turns to see the house
suddenly small beneath its tent of faded stars.
Will these children live? He now wishes
fervently to know. Should their difficult dreams
find form, in metal, pool, or life-consuming flame
and seek them out, he might well be powerless
against the then rushing in of dark. He sees
his footprints black in the frost, wandering
from the porch, as if the duty guard
has deserted, chasing moonbeams. A red cow
nips his idled hand, and he hops back,
ripping palm against barbed wire. The blood
seems strange in moonlight, black, or green perhaps.
Blood gone from man, man from house, this moment
a vector: metamorphoses, Ovid, the placid cows.
He returns, stepping in the black holes his feet
have made. The comfortable chair, with its
o very good but not quite comforting Frost,
sits waiting for his life to go on, as if
it were a thing not changed.