Alchemisland

We left a fire reduced to ashes

Clumps of crumpled gift wrapping, snapped crackers

Half-finished wine glasses, Santa’s gifts of biscuits and Guinness on the windowsill

The good silver, the fine china, the piano’s white keys shining with recent touch

The musk of gaiety, the carols seeming to linger beyond the singer

Ah, the fates and arrows fate slings; the faith of vain kings replaceable

The fated king per arrangement born an angel babe

Away in his manger with the creatures baying.

We left happy, chatting

The cold seeming to keep off by the heat of our steaming passion

Turning the keys, full of turkey and seasonal yearning, the axel squealed

And we peeled down the gravel drive just as the worst of the weather arrived

It seemed the sheep we passed bleated for our ears to hear; screaming sleet!

White as a sheet containing lies admitted by a demon, the pitiless sky scheming

And all of it streaming down now, throughout the evening dropping by even degrees

A great freeze all the old timers felt brewing in their preternatural knees

Naturally, they prayed, hoping nature would obey, hoping to constrain

Those forces which make us mortal, in the fortress all the forges

Stoking to fearsomeness, fires sawing all Winter and Autumn, gorgeous

And saving, graceful and pale as the steeplehands of Our Lady of Lourdes praying

For a saviour; saving all your love for an evening such

One cannot imagine such indulgences as sulking

Such hulking moatfilling weather, displeasing heatneeding Vulcan

Such bulking snow forming pleasure domes, coating roads

Growing to the size of the prize of Rhodes; no, one enjoyed the remote

Feeling the great freezing seemed to supply; in that white, we are alone.

It was Christmas past and outside snow was lashing

Falling fast, like Lucifer recalcitrant at last cast out that hallowed land

And we were dashing through it

Some saw the storm which blew as anarchic confusion

Others yet viewed as impressive, as much and improvement

As anything else, a white net casted wide 

In that white, memories of trails, encasing every movement

Such bitter moons, such abusive grey hues boon the sky, the frail afraid

Afraid to die; that snow white, the white of the eye

It seems that nothing against such white could hide

And yet therein much in hiding time biding, all behind

Severed binds like withering vines found at the base of the slope the escapee climbed

Ghosts hopeless and frozen, below the coating which stows when the cold wind blows

A tired-eye bride and groom eloping, the broken bridle which yolked the pony who died

Before his time, losing his footing during the perilous climb; she cried that night