A House in Winter's Hold 

There’s a house on a hill in a woods somewhere, 

in a woods where no one sees 

(save those who pass with a lasting stare 

at its glimmer of light through the trees). 

In winter it’s a shadow of black 

half-hidden by trees of gray, 

and an arm of smoke gropes from its stack 

and waves with a lonely sway.

 

Then comes a whistling winter wind. 

The house shuts tight with a shoulder pinned 

against a threatening door 

and waits for what’s in store. 

A blizzard is coming; windows are humming; 

to the wind’s tune the shutters are drumming. 

The house is clenched in Winter’s hold

— freezing, frosting, frightening cold, 

bare tress bending to and fro

 in the pageantry of snow: 

sifting, blowing, drifting, growing, 

Autumn’s reaped and Winter’s sowing

— sowing seeds of icy white; 

snow sifts through the moonless night; 

falling thick with crystal frills 

skirting ‘round the timbered hills; 

lacing lace on dry leaves curled, 

still clung to branches bare; 

and covering softly all the world 

that the house on the hill in the woods somewhere 

will ever, ever know. 

© Copyright 1978, Tom Kapanka, Patterns of Ink 

This was one of the first poems I ever wrote. (The title never seemed right but I left it all unrevised.) It was an experiment in rhythms and alliteration. The setting was inspired in part by Frost's "An Old Man's Winter Night" and the knowledge that a part of my father could happily live that life... but the lines were based mostly on that fine but foreboding feeling that comes when a family is snowbound in a winter storm as we were more than once in our house on a hill deep in the woods (which, by the way, is not in the house in the first picture. The shutters were drumming only in my imagination; our house never did get shutters, but they were part of Dad's original plan.)  From this February 2010 post:1976-1977 When I headed back to college after Christmas, I looked at the house as we pulled out the two-track drive. None of the exterior brick was on the house; the walls were Celotex sheeting wrapped in tar-paper, and to me it looked like “a shadow of black half-hidden by trees of gray,” an image I recalled a year later, when I headed back to college and the walls were encased in the old brick Dad bought from the cleared RenCen site in Detroit. Along with the exterior brick, the chimney now stood in place from the basement floor right up through the roof, and the basement was heated by a wood-buring stove, which made the second part of the image possible: "And an arm of smoke gropes from its stack and waves with a lonely sway." It was in the weeks after that second Christmas in the basement that I wrote the following poem. A year after writing it, I entered the lines in a creative writing contest and won first place. It was the first "prize" I'd ever won for writing. [I say that as if many followed. It was actually the first of very few honors I earned with a typewriter.] 0392