Breathing

Winter breathes upon me
like the night upon a loom,
upon an unfinished weave
anticipating warm, sunlight hands to grow.
I am caught in this sparse stillness,
in light frozen by the snow,
time that waits
for an emergent percussion to tap tap tap
awake the next fragmentary rhythm,
the next of songs that
heartbeats tend to follow.
Have I always, though, been carried along
by the alternation between
the dark and the light,
this rat instinctively clawing toward
the difference? (But this is
a casual anguish, only.) The air, now,
can be a frigid forgetting
here in the minding of the moment.
It would seem I do not remember
how it is, exactly, I arrived;
I forget to wonder why.
This rat is merely sniffing
for when the next tide is to turn, breathing
in the frozen light,
exhaling warm darkness,
knows enough
not to stray too far
from what it knows.
The threads that make me up,
the hundred weaves
that make the pattern: me me me me:
I will not know which thread, the last.
Or that pattern, what it is,
see merely the colors of the yarn,
fragmentary stories
in some incomprehensible array
of things that happen, and things I do.
Some of it makes sense, I will admit.
I find I breathe upon winter
as if I were beginning to say something,
but I am as frozen
as a finished pattern,
or as still as one pretending to be.