Winter Dreaming

              'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 

              … To sail beyond the sunset, 

              … and tho' / We are not now that strength which in old days 

              Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, -- 

              One equal temper of heroic hearts 

              Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

              To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.     

                                                                        (Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Orion walks across the night sky

in the clear cold of winter’s darkness,

when the air bites through layers

of wool and down and tears well up

in my eyes and freeze there,

burning as I watch him walk away, westward,

circumnavigating this earth, my own desires

left behind in silence, frozen in my standing here,

dreaming of other places I’ve yet to see,

other lives I’ve yet to live.