Three Poems

THE TREES

The sunset light is singeing the horizon
    Above leafless woods, the freeze
Setting its seal on all the tilted
    Surfaces of the land, on roofs and road,
Till only the trees still stand out there
    In this after-midnight snow, ledge
On ledge of the pines weighed down,
    Fingers of fir shaped into distinctness
By the accumulating white. In the dark
    Of starless dawn, the first plough
Goes through, and early cars
    Armoured in ice, come crunching out
Over frost, their careful beams
    Brushing the trunks whose ancestors supplied
These clapboard walls out-facing still
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