Betrothed

Image by Jan Doerffel


“Betrothed”

You hear yourself walking on snow.
You hear the absence of birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. They say we are born alone,
to live and die alone.
But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure.
When I hit the log frozen in the woodpile
to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of the twilight
that awakens me in the middle of a life.
The black and white of me mated
with this indifferent winter landscape.
I think of the moon coming in a little while
to find the white
among these colorless pines.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on RP Meditations