Andrew Burke

Late Winter Night

The old dog is snoring. It’s a comforting sound late night in this empty house. The gas heater has warmed the furniture, walls, carpets and floorboards, and the dishwasher in the kitchen has filed away my sparse dishes for washing with tomorrow’s lot.

This poem has no birds in it, as Jack Spicer said some time off. I’ve been reading him, there’s nothing on TV. It is late in this dry winter and at last the earth here is wet with rain. Three ducks from the rising waters of the swamp across the road waddle for dinner across our overgrown and weed-filled lawn. They are silent and not in this poem.

I turn ABC Jazz off and the dog stops snoring. Is there any meaning in this? The day is interlaced with such relationships yet we drudge through our hours, aware of insignificance.  I often think of reality as a knitting pattern with multiple dimensions,  knit one, purl two. No pattern, just chaos and its resultant energy.

Her snoring returns as I rise to turn off the heater and go to bed. I stand beside her, looking down for a moment before she awakes, yawns, and looks at me questioningly. I don’t know, I tell her, I don’t know either.

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