A brilliant ice has bent these birches over.
In warmer weather, back when you were young,
You’d swing them. Winter woods bring back that age.
You shiver for a moment, then recover,
Imagining the birches being swung
By a passing poet, mad man, boy, or lover
Freed suddenly from thoughts of violence
That only swinging birches can assuage.

As a boy, most of your songs were still unsung;
As a lover, you had hope; as poet, cause;
As a man, white with experience, a rage
Has been congealing lately, but it thaws
As you hold hands with birches you once flung.
They’re teaching you of bending, in a silence.

When I say that there never was a green more green
than the pinewoods where I stopped, in a natural nave,
I can’t, simply explaining what I’ve seen,
convey the facts, no less the feeling, that I mean.
I know from color theory you cannot have
a greener green than one that’s set off by
its opposite. This one was topped in white,
a hiding and revealing layer of delicate snow.
Above all this, the blue of a chilled sky
as the day was approaching the gloam of twilight.

The white was set off by black in that the low
sun cast the eastern side of the boles in shadow.
As for the green—yes, red dappled the various tracks,
and the feathers and fur bits left from attacks.
Well, that is Nature, splendid and fearsome 
at the same time. And yet the violence
next to the rapids left the evidence
that others had been just where I had come,
whence I must leave in hopes that I get home
by dinner, and then try to start a poem.