December

Poems from Rivard Street
by Benjamin Oldham


Sleeping Minds

Sleeping minds lie

like boulders

in an old forest.

They are bold

to lie among the living

undisturbed by growth,

and bolder still

to lie to us outright

with thoughts

we call our own

the weighted steps

have only planted at our feet.

Who can trust a mind

of boulder fields?

And who can move

the boulders out,

sweep away the glacial debris,

the many heavy tons?


But anyone walking

through an old forest

may notice how a tree

will split a boulder

in its way,

pressing overhead

and over time

until the boulder breaks

and lies there

with a wicked crack

in its former nature,

its two halves struck down

like twin parts of a mind

that, in order

to wake the other,

need to fall silently in a forest

with no one there to hear,

no one there

to put them back to sleep.


A Year of Yellow Septembers

Under the first snow,

all the worlds I know

have disappeared.

And buried with them too

are all the worlds

I never knew were possible,

as if the snow

has evened out the chances

of the things to come

when it is gone,

as if the spring

may not return

and what may come instead

is something like

a year of yellow Septembers.


Only when the world

has disappeared

before my eyes

do I begin to think so much

about what was

and what may be.

The same may go for me,

I think,

when I have disappeared

into the snow,

the kind that turns to water

on my cheek

and ice upon my nose—

the same may go for me,

the spring may step aside

to let me have

a year of yellow Septembers.