"Some quick folk dance of kindness": a poem by Michael Ryan

In the depths of an unkind February, I return to this poem, one I've long admired and often given to my students.  I love how the poet, Michael Ryan, deftly mingles the melancholy feel of an early twilight with the hopelessness of an irretrievable love.  That last line--the speaker's admission that he brought on his own bad luck--always pierces me like a pin prick.  I particularly like how the poem sets up this idea by showing us those "gray women in stretch slacks" and their "quick folk dance of kindness," how we know without the poem saying so that the speaker regrets his own lack of kindness, knowing that if he'd shown a little more of it to his beloved she might still be with him

In Winter

At four o'clock it's dark.

Today, looking out through dusk

at three gray women in stretch slacks

chatting in front of the post office,

their steps left and right and back

like some quick folk dance of kindness,

I remembered the winter we spent

crying in each other's laps.

What could you be thinking at this moment?

How lovely and strange the gangly spines

of trees against a thickening sky

as you drive from the library

humming off-key?  Or are you smiling

at an idea met in a book

the way you smiled with your whole body

the first night we talked?

I was so sure my love of you was perfect,

and the light today

reminded me of the winter you drove home

each day in the dark at four o'clock

and would come into my study to kiss me

despite mistake after mistake after mistake.