Chestnuts

They came home in a coat pocket, eleven, and one split husk still holding on like a fist.

On the table they shine the way a horse's flank shines, the way nothing you could buy does,

and by tomorrow they won't. Everyone who has carried them home knows this, and carries them anyway.

A child pushes matchsticks in for legs, a neck, two arms that cannot reach each other,

and stands the man up by the fruit bowl to dull and shrink and wrinkle and be kept, somehow, till spring.

Outside it's nine degrees and grey, dark before six. Under the lamp the shine is going, slowly,

like the warmth of a room after the guests have gone. Nobody throws them out. Not tonight.