He opens his eyes to a hard frost, the morning's soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse are starred crystal; each bud like a candied fruit, its yellow picked out and lit by the low pulse of blood-orange riding in the eastern trees.

What the snow has furred to silence, uniformity, frost amplifies, makes singular: giving every form a sound, an edge, as if frost wants to know what snow tries to forget.

And so he drinks for winter, for the coming year, to open all the beautiful tiny doors in their craquelure of frost; and he drinks like the snow falling, trying to close the biggest door of all.

A friend saw the rooms Of Keats and Shelley At the lake, and saw ‘they were just Boys’ rooms’ and was moved By that. And indeed a poet’s room Is a boy’s room And I suppose that women know it. Perhaps the unbeautiful banker Is exciting to a woman, a man Not a boy gasping For breath over a girl’s body.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes - On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands - There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.