The House of the Silver Spirit

I am a February child. I love these things-
This broken shell of a house and the terrible song it
         sings,
And winter shrieking wildly at this door.
It has been here for eighty years or more.

With Mile Bluff on the west and on the east
Sheep Pasture Bluff, it spreads a lavish feast
For sound as any singer dreams to do;
Out on the frosted highway of the wind
Its roofs are honed, its walls are razor-thinned
Till winter sweeps an icy river through.

I think this house broke from some wild travail
When Indian wigwams made this placid dale
A place of haunting treachery and dread,

And copper faces lifted up to see
This strange new miracle that came to be.
I think at first it was untenanted
Like clay that waits the coming of a soul,
And when the wintry tides began to roll
Over these roofs the silver spirit came.
From the unholy wind it learned the song
That pleased its bitter mouth these ages long,
A song that trembles like a frosty flame,

I do not know how wisdom entered it,
Suddenly as the cold white stars are lit
Or slowly like a window-spread of frost.
I only know that I have failed to trace
The lives that crumpled in this barren place;
Here they were born and here gave up the ghost,
If they are not still here, then they are lost.

I came to birth here in a month of snows,
And it is only winter my mind knows-
Winter of ice and winter summer spills:
The incantation of the wailing pines,
The hills in moonlight etched in frosty lines,
The cold lamenting of the whippoorwills.

House of my frozen hope, on you I fed,
Dreamed at your window, wept upon your bed
Through the long shivery years of white and blue,
And till I die and after death has passed
Your singing soul will hold my spirit fast
With silver threads of winters that I knew.
Oh, even now the needle pushes through-

There was one winter of a dreadful lack,
The wolves howled all night in the tamarack
Swamps in the moonlight; they had dared so near
This house and my mind's house, a whole age younger,
Cried with the wolves the same wild ache of hunger,
A sound more deep and terrible than fear.

There was a winter when I took a breath
For the first time from the white fields of death
(Always on nakedness the cold would press)
Till in surrender I became a cry,
A tone in this dark building's lullaby,
Some other child shall swallow my distress,
Hear in these walls my echoing loneliness.

Therefore, my music, you must never be
and sweet and a profanity,
Let all my tones be clear and sharp and wild.
This old house bore me in her frosty womb,
And winter cradled me in sound and gloom;
I am their desolate and frightened child.

Copyright permission to publish has been given by the
Carmel of the Mother of God, Pewaukee Wisconsin. All rights reserved.

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