Not Ready

Imagining It
by Kate Barnes


At eighteen, in Paris,

I just woke up out of a dream

just before dawn, and stepped through the long window

from my cold room with its red silk walls.

Shivering a little in my dressing gown,

I leaned on the balustrade

and, look, overnight a light snow had fallen;

no car had driven over it yet, it lay in the street

as white, as innocent, as snow on the open fields.

Then something approached with a calm rhythm

of hoof-beats made softer by the snow, the sound

of a quiet heart. It was a heaped-up wood cart

pulled by a gray horse who walked along slowly,

head down, while the driver

sat at the back of one shaft and hunched over

to light his cigarette.

From above, I saw clearly

the lit match in the old man's cupped hands, its glow

on his long jaw, the small well of flame

between his living palms like the flare

of the soul in his body. He went on

down the street, and the sky went on

growing lighter, and I saw how he left

his dark tracks behind him on the whiteness

of the snow, just the lines of the two wheels,

slightly wavering, and the dints of the horse's hooves

between them, a writing in an undiscovered

language, something whose meaning

we feel sure we know, and still can't quite

translate.

When I stepped inside again,

I stopped thinking about love for a minute — I thought about it

almost all the time then — and thought instead

about being alive for a while in a world

with cobblestones, new snow, and the unconscious

poem printed by hooves on the maiden street.

Of course I was not yet ready to be grateful.