Winter by Ruth Stone

Winter

The ten o’clock train to New York,

coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.

Steam wheezes between the couplings.

Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room

imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.

Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife.

Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.

It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.

Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.

It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.

I think about the subjugation of women and horses;

brutal exposure; weather that forces, that strips.

In our time we met in ornate stations

arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.

I remember you running beside the train waving good-bye.

I can produce a facsimile of you standing

behind a column of polished oak to surprise me.

Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?

Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks:

mounds of rusting wire, grotesque pop art of dead motors,

senile warehouses. The train passes a station;

fresh people standing on the platform,

their faces expecting something.

I feel their entire histories ravish me.