A Red Bird in Winter
During the long night of winter the city pauses, midway between dark and day. It goes on like this for weeks: each bleary dawn, the fickle light, the slow descent into twilight. There are consolations, however. A morning sky like burnished silver; the sly moon, gliding across the landscape. After a snow the light is brilliant, and on the first day of the year we dredge for hope in its drifts.
All the things we might love appear without warning, appear out of nowhere, like the red bird in winter that turns the season toward light. The winter swells like a wound; it wells up in us; suspends us, our shovels frozen in mid-air. We are like mammoths, fossils imprisoned in ice until something in us trickles free, until the crystalline structure shatters and we move again, flowing toward the light.
On the first day of the year the houses across the alley loom like old ghosts. They waver in a squall, their shape traced and erased by branches. A cardinal lands in the cedar, sings despite the storm. A light goes on in someone’s kitchen, a kettle scrapes across the stove. And rapidly I dress and put on my coat, and go out to greet the year.
[A version of this post appeared at Reading Toronto on 1 January 2008.]
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