Walking in Snow

(Langadia, the Peloponnese)

Walking in snow makes me
think of Russia: ice in the village
street, faded signs that might be
Cyrillic, lettered in old-style Greek;
grizzled trees; men in flapped
fur hats; women shawled, flowered
and fringed like nesting dolls;
houses with fretwork eaves - it could
be a village in Muscovy.

Crows the same the whole world over
settle on snow-burdened beech;
beneath an overcoat of frosty purity
the cold earth sleeps. Moist-mother-
earth the folk-poets of Russia called
the soil they tilled, but those folk in
the frozen field are villagers of Greece.

A rustic Christ in ochre stone
grieves on the lintel's bas-relief;
figures wend their way among fresh
mounds like unmarked graves.

Voices carry through the sifting
flakes unnamed, plangent as the night-
bird with his questing phrase, tempering
the stillness of the valley in a minor
key, quivering through spruces locked
in silences, like poetry.