William Virgil Davis: “The Pond in Winter”
THE POND IN WINTER
You opened the window and a white bird
flew in and lighted on the post
at the bottom of the bed. You awakened
to find your feet cold and the cat sleeping
in the corner of the room. Outside, the pond
was frozen, the snow and the fog over it like
blankets and one lone bird hunched in a tree
near your window. The snow was falling
silently and, as you stood at the window
watching, the bird, quite suddenly,
lifted out of the tree and flew low over the pond
and disappeared into the weather forever.
William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New. He has published five other books of poetry: The Bones Poems; Landscape and Journey, which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry; Winter Light; The Dark Hours, which won the Calliope Press Chapbook Prize; One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poems have appeared in Agenda, Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, The Nation, Malahat Review, The New Criterion, PN Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Yale Review, among many others.