In Singing Weather

In September, third quarter moon
 [ ... ]

In Indian summer we know
 [ ... ]

When the wind of October rises up under doorways
 [ ... ]

The light revolves in its own whimsy
Largo through branches and falling leaves:
the hard blues now of shuffle and dip,
plunked banjo, fiddle wheeze and guitar.

All through the pale October dusk I have called out,
Called out but made no sound. The hills, tucked
in red blankets of sun, are my voice for this weather,
my round cousins. When I can’t sing, they lull the sky

and improvise limpid tunes for the barns.
My voice makes only faint and courtly gestures
toward the rim of light, off, there, another
scene I named badly, another collapse of words.

Even the dogs won’t go out in this weather.
Tonight is not a night for walking but for sitting
still on the soft warm rugs of winter coming,
hard blues, and the laying in.

Perched on the kitchen table I look out
at morning fog so thick it muffles
even its own soft noise over white November
fields and does not burn off by noon
but goes on covering us all day. A year
has seemed a month or less, yet I find
I don’t work harder, now I’m dying faster,
just pay more careful attention to the sky.
Nearly all the yellow leaves are gone

and those plants I hung to give green
this winter cover the whole window now
greener every day against white mist.
Fuga, from the Latin, flight, and in the long
rests I think I hear glissando, egregious
narrowing down to that raw muscle,
my heart, with its hum of longing.
Still, I am less grim in fog and bare trees
than in October with that crazy wind. Grandeur
makes me nervous, and now the ravaged ground
and shabby bean vines seem, at least, to match
my soul. Where there is congruence, there is
hope. After long silence, there might be music,
subtle and insistent as the Hudson River,
tidal, as far north as Troy.

At the winter solstice I know again
the only point is to catch the light,
the soft shading behind black branches
against white sky. I try to hold
this moment of change in the sun
the east lit up in negative,
the hills to the south glowing
from inside, and the dark sweep
where the leaves were carried off into clouds
or another range of hills. The point, after all,
is to say only: winter light, what’s here.

The brown summer boxes of leaves thrown down
And abandoned are now resurrected in dirt,
In the vacancy under the curve of fence line,
in the deeper shadow where the road
lies hung in its ruts. I give rapt
attention to weather and record it:
the solid black trunks of the oaks,
the small evening fires.
A formal music comforts
by velocity of measure and thin melody
cello obligato, the deep soft voice of coming snow.

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.