"Heart of the Backlog"
by Robert Penn Warren (1978-01-22)

Snug at hearthside, while heart of the backlog
Of oak simmers red in the living pulse of its own
Decay, you sit. You count
Your own heartbeat. How steady, how
Firm! What, ah, is Time! And sometimes

It is hard, after all, to decide
If the ticking you now hear is
A whisk of granules of snow,
Hard and belated on panes, or simply
The old organ, fist-size and resolute,
Now beastlike caught
In your rib-cage, to pace

But go nowhere. It does,
In a ghostly sense, suggest now the sound of
Pacing, as if, in soft litter, curved claws
Were muffled. Or is it
The pace of the muffled old clock in the hall?

You watch the talus-like slide of
Consumed oak from oak yet consuming. Yes, tell me
How many the years that burn there. How delicate, dove-gray
The oak-ash that, tiny and talus-like, slides to unwink
The glowing of oak and the years unconsumed!
What is the color of years your fireplace consumes as you sit there?

But think, shut your eyes. Shut your eyes and see only
The wide stretch of world beyond your warm refuge—fields
Windless and white in full moonlight,
Snow past and now steady the stars, and, far off,
The woods-lair of darkness. Listen! is that
The great owl that you, warm at your hearthside, had heard?

How feather-frail, think, is the track of the vole
On new snow! How wide is the world! How fleeting and thin
Its mark of identity, breath
In a minuscule issue of whiteness
In air that is brighter than steel! The vole pauses, one paw
Uplifted in whiteness of moonlight.

There is no indication of what angle, or slant,
The great shadow may silkily accent the beauty of snow,
And the vole, Little One, has neither theology nor
Aesthetic—not even what you may call
Stoicism, as when the diagnostician pauses, and coughs.
Poor thing, he has only himself. And what do you have

When you go to the door, snatch it open, and, cold,
The air strikes like steel down your lungs, and you feel
The Pascalian nausea make dizzy the last stars?
Then shut the door. The backlog burns down. You sit and

Again the owl calls, and with some sadness you wonder
If at last, when the air-scything shadow descends
And needles claw-clamp through gut, heart and brain,
Will ecstasy melting with terror create the last little cry?
Is God’s love but the last and most mysterious word for death?

Has the thought ever struck you to rise and go forth—yes, lost
In the whiteness—to never look upward, or back, only on,
And no sound but the snow-crunch, and breath
Gone crisp like the crumpling of paper? Listen!
Could that be the creak of a wing-joint gigantic in distance?

No, no—just a tree, far off, when ice inward bites.
No, no, don’t look back—oh, I beg you!

I beg you not to look back, in God’s name.