1.
Imagine waking
to a scene of snow so new
not even memories
of other snow
can mar its silken
surface. What other innocence
is quite like this,
and who can blame me
for refusing
to violate such whiteness
with the booted cruelty
of tracks?
2.
When I was
nearly six my
father
opened his magic
doctor bag:
two
tongue depressors fastened by
a rubber
band;
one flick
of his hairy wrist
and lo!
we invented
flight.
Dear lost sharer
of silences,
I would send a letter
the way the tree sends messages
in leaves,
or the sky in exclamations
of pure cloud.
Therefore I write
in this blue
ink, color
of secret veins
and arteries.
It is morning here.
Already the postman walks
Even the flags seemed frozen
to their poles, and the men
stamping their well-shod feet
resembled an army of overcoats.
But we were young and fueled
by hope, our ardor burned away
the cold. We were the president’ s,
and briefly the president would be ours.
The old poet stumbled
over his own indelible words,
his breath a wreath around his face:
a kind of prophecy.
are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them
as they swoop and gather —
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.
It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.
And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice —
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.
