At Christmas in an empty house at night,
Too much dry winter air for him to sleep
For whom the furnace has become a friend
Downstairs with reassuring work to do,
He rises, coughing, to admit a crack
Of cold against this overhuman time,
Skirting by old memory the tree
That would have stood there by the window frame,
And finding, snow glazed over and the moon
Abroad, a light so hard across the fields,
So colorless, so bare of human means
To any end his heart could still conceive,
Throws up the sash, leans out and swallows deep
The fine cold tonic emptiness of things.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 7 Number 2, on page 45
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