First Snow

A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:

           imbibing the silence,

           you stare at spruce needles:

                                 there’s no sound of a leaf blower,

                                 no sign of a black bear;

a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack

           against an aspen trunk;

           a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.    

                      You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:

when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,

but when it stops, it blends in again;

           the world of being is like this gravel:

                      you think you own a car, a house,

                      this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.    

Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams

                      and stood at Gibraltar,

                                            but you possess nothing.

Snow melts into a pool of clear water;

           and, in this stillness,

                      starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.