for Jordi and Nuria

Now we have locked the doors against the snow
And feel it falling at each curtained window,
The house walls seem to thicken and resist
That movement into flocculence and mist,
Shapes that take the impression of the winds,
Scarving themselves around the gable-ends,
Or piling white oblivion on the stones
That once were ways, alternatives, directions
Refusing to become what they are now—
The unmapped territories of the falling snow.
But the room looms squarer as the tightening cold
Penetrates the fault-lines of our threshold:
Here, whiteness of the open book withstands
These long advances out of polar lands
To claim all for the north, that cannot find—
A roving presence, pathless, angered, blind—
The grain this hate of harvest would efface,
Our cell of fire beneath the blank of space.