The rain turns snow more quickly
than we’d guessed, near Ashland say,
squinting through snow, through lyrics now,
the ice and building ice in winter fields.
And so the shoulders whitening. So love
at fifty-one, the snows assisting
the pace of taking in. We’ll get this meeting
out of us. And the first words,
like repeated samplings, finding enough
to say for days, finding such warmth
when cold would set its hold on visiting,
building ourselves as is, and love
at fifty-one, even as love had seemed,
for forty years imagining.
So you are the lift and scope and book and best of this!
And what if the ice, iced curves,
the traffic in suspense, must slow me as I come,
the buses abrupt in squinting snow,
so little daylight left, filled with these spots of geese,
come lining into weather, a broken
and re-collecting form, existing in almost
mindful sleet, over this slush I think
must build predictably, until the moonlight’s
visiting, the moonlight’s worked
its change on everything, over imperfect
/perfecting love – following
desire’s lead and sighing our verb’s worth,
become the dawn’s first freshening –
here where you’ve found me now /struck
by this snow made light
among the shading limbs and deadfall
/by these words – this poem – before
I’ve found the words for it?