The End of the Beginning

In the retreat to dreams I saw a cold grey harbor and a slate grey sea,
With a V-shaped flight of pure white birds against a saffron sky,
And I thought of that frozen white field I crossed
On the night that my dad went away,
Following his footprints through the drifting snow to that final dark shed,
Where at the edge of nothing and the beginning of nowhere
He came to think sometimes,
And where his footprints disappeared just beyond the door,
As if he strode into nothing in the middle of an empty hay shed,
His footprints disappearing into a sculpted arc of windblown snow
That had drifted in through a gap in the beaten wall,
With no prints striding forth again on the other side,
A frigid cipher in white,
And twilight fell, and the driving snow was swallowed by the driving dark,
And I just stood and stared with my fingers numb,
And heard those old sad hymns go quietly through my mind:
In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet on that beautiful shore,
There’s a land that is fairer than day, and our spirits shall sorrow no more; And I was all alone in the driving snow,
So far from home and a long walk back with nothing to show
And even less to tell,
And somewhere blue icebergs floated lazily by the harbor mouth
Against a dark and stormy horizon where no white birds would ever fly again,
And no immortals would ever sail into the West,
And all that was left to me was a shotgun that fell apart when you fired it
And an old metal bucket full of coal from grandpa’s forge,
Like treasure from a Hell burned over and sealed in ash,
While somewhere in the north I heard the lightning crash
To set the white stallions free at last,
To thunder their freedom across the vast and frozen plains 
Between the mountains of madness and the last river of sadness,
And I knew they came for me,
And I knew the place where we would go although I had never been before,
And I knew it waited for me,
Waited for me to finish dreaming, or to start again, 
But I just made fists in the howling dark and hummed the hymns again,
While the coyotes yipped and yelped for the sheer glee of the storm,
And the stallions thundered onward through the distant dark,
And the last light of something winked finally out inside my head,
And I slowly turned to go,
Back through the sideways snow that stung my cheek
And out across the nothing once again,
Following those two sets of footprints back to the beginning,
Though I knew when I got there they would both disappear into nothing
And that would be the end.