At first light I hear miles of silence.

Except for the First Selectman’s snowtires

snuffling up Main Street, it’s Sunday-quiet;

half awake, knowing that deer season’s done,

I dream of does wounded, bedded in spruce groves.

And bucks downed in the bog, who had last night

to give up. I doze with Han-Shan, the old T’ang drunk,

who took to Cold Mountain after the capital

turned down his poems. The woodfire’s dying;

I get myself up to stroke it, rewrite night-notes

next to the stove, and wake my wife. After breakfast,

before I try to home-in on today’s unwritten poem,

we go out into winter to fell next year’s wood:

with her small ax and my stuttering saw, we cut near the bog,

on the low spruce crown of the woodlot we call Cold Knoll.