Deep-Breathing Cycle

I think this is really interesting, but I admit I don't really understand it. Is it a meditation on death? An old man waiting for death? Not sure, but I really like the winter imagery and unique phrasing.

The very simple stanzas and short lines make this very readable. There are strong images, densely packed throughout. The focus on nature is quite apparent. The tone seems sad, wistful, then, just at the end, urgent.

The imagery got a bit muddled for me beginning at the third stanza. The notion of light shading color is strange. I made sense of this by imagining that we are talking about snow covering leaves. The next stanza is a mystery to me. The next stanza is even less clear, and is syntactically strange as well. (It is restful, in the first two lines, but "blood still roars" counteracts this feeling -to say that blood "still" roars implies an expectation that it wouldn't, and since blood represents life, this line in total suggests a man near death but who doesn't want to die). And the final stanza introduces an indentation, the only one in the poem, suggesting it has some importance, but I can't figure out quite what it is.

It seems that something of a process of falling apart mentally is being enacted by the poem; which is to say, we are going through some kind of difficult mental reasoning. We are gradually losing control of sense, and syntax, and then, finally, a loss of control enacted by a line indentation -but then a return to normalcy in the final line.

If I were forced to give an interpretation I would say that this is a poem about someone confronting the inevitability of death (summer and light and warmth makes way for winter and night and cold), becoming increasingly agitated at the prospect, and then eventually reaching some kind of partial acceptance.

Beautifully written. Don't really get the reference of the title with the poem, though.