Self-Portrait as Picture Window

First day of snow, the low sun

glinting on the gate post where a single

Teviot ewe is licking

frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep

away in the lower field, the light on the crusted

meadow grass that makes me think

of unripe plums so local an event

it seems, for one long breath,

that time might stop;

or, better, that it isn’t me at all

who stands here, at this window, gazing out,

not me who woke up late, when everyone

had gone to work or school, but someone else,

a man so like myself that nobody

would spot the difference– same eyes, same mouth –

but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely

register in words, unless I call it

graceful and nomadic, some lost art

of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight,

the feel of distance singing in the flesh,

that happiness-as-forage, bedding in,

declining, making sense of what it finds.