A Puzzle in Four Seasons

A Puzzle in Four Seasons

Look at us. It must be Christmas.
Our heads are bowed, the lamp close.
We could be cracking a code
or a body, so intent are we tonight

on Spring, whose large foreground
of wild daffodils could take us all winter.
We check the lid from time to time like artists
more absorbed in what they’re doing than what’s there:

a village coming into itself
all at once, in all weathers;
yielding itself to nothing more
than the hours of its own slow resurrection.

It’s not often we come together like this.
Nor do we believe for one minute
in this village or its charmed stoicism.
We attend to it quietly, with quick fingers.