New poem
Now here is a genuinely new one, even though it was actually begun in November:
Crossing the Fields in Piliscsaba
November’s clean sun, sharper than the frost,
wefted gilt filaments across my way,
walking on fieldpaths to the peal of bells;
iced-over puddles crunching underfoot,
the first ice I had seen in these ten years.
I snapped off a transparent flint spearhead
knapped by the full moon on the water’s face
last frosty night, a sliver of pure cold,
and held it till it melted in a pool
on the steel supermarket counter top.
Writing this now on the red fire hydrant
under a spreading chestnut by the stream
near where the yellow willow shakes its locks
beside the Slovak village monument
with its totemic effigies, I know
I reached back over lost time to reclaim
what I had lost, a fragment of the past
keeping its shape as it dissolved away.