Even the breathless dead seem,
sometimes, nevertheless, to sing.

At last it’s snowed and hushed the hills,
all the forest veins revealed.

The December sky is generous once more
with a light tender as a ragtime piano

frowsy as the woman who plays it by ear
and tilts her head. She’s hard as nails.

Her hands build bookcases and every ivory shelf thrums,
as she jumps all her tricky sweetness off the stool

and onto the floor. She sings in a frolic fast
as a running heart, each note wound to every other.

After long silence, there is music again,
thin lip of moon and again bright stars,

the weeds, safe now in their coffins of ice,
in singing weather. The pets of my childhood

nose the white drifts in bright collars
and bows and I whistle them home to me,

in from the cold. Now the formal dead
can love me back, with their voices

carried on the wind. And I can hold them,
rock them in my own melodic arms.