Threshold

On the new century’s threshold -
unmapped exile of time and place -
she remembered a distant window in another
country, where the gray houses would come to offer their
looming shadows at the night-shrouded market square
for an awed child’s soul to choose from,
when a horse’s hooves played such dark music on
the snow-hushed cobblestones and the ethereal
light of gas street-lamps illumined such
infinite loneliness, punctuated only by
an occasional church bell tolling,
that she wished to go back to that severed
omniscient talking horse-head and that
barefoot goose girl on the black-and-white
pasture of her fairy tale book -
for that other mystery,
which spoke not in silence but words,
and knew nothing of passing time.

The Deronda Review