Words go on travelling from voice <br />to voice while the phones are still <br />and the wires hum in the cold. Now <br />and then dark winter birds settle <br />slowly on the crossbars, where huddled <br />they caw out their loneliness. Except <br />for them the March world is white <br />and barely alive. The train to Providence <br />moans somewhere near the end <br />of town, and the churning of metal <br />on metal from so many miles away <br />is only a high thin note trilling <br />the frozen air. Years ago I lived <br />not far from here, grown to fat <br />and austerity, a man who came <br />closely shaven to breakfast and ate <br />in silence and left punctually, alone, <br />for work. So it was I saw it all <br />and turned away to where snow <br />fell into snow and the wind spoke <br />in the incomprehensible syllable <br />of wind, and I could be anyone: <br />a man whose life lay open before him, <br />a book with no ending, a widow <br />bearing white carnations at dusk <br />to a hillside graveyard turned <br />to blank rubble, a cinder floating <br />down to earth and blinking slowly out, <br />too small to mean a thing, too tired <br />to even sigh. If life comes back, <br />as we are told it does, each time one <br />step closer to the edge of truth, <br />then I am ready for the dawn <br />that calls a sullen boy from sleep <br />rubbing his eyes on a white window <br />and knowing none of it can last the day.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/another-song/
