Snowmelt

Just a sliver of light

has jimmied the clouds loose—

a thief picking a lock of sky

—though for a while longer,

maybe an hour,

the sun won’t be noticeable

on the slopes of Snake Mountain,

and netted over the leafless grove

of cherry and maple

holding up yesterday’s snow.

If memory could take a shape

I think it would have the hands

of that thief. If I think of one place,

the chintz of it in the snowpack

melting away, I can also remember

the place underneath this one, the heaviness

of ice turning the rhododendron

to a flock of nuthatches at rest.

Beyond the window the wind rests

and clears a way in a hundred directions

and in the quarter dark I can just make out

an albino crow on a hillside

and behind her the two others

standing so still that the blue stem

seems more alive, and the uphill crows

could be shadows

made flesh. Now I could mistake

the real thing for the unreal

and then come to find out

memory is both.

In the place beneath

the loud kingdom

of my skull, I become the thief

breaking into what I left behind

as in once, out the elevator doors

years ago at a party in Greenwich Village

where men and women covered

in diamonds and gold and wearing

the finest clothes I’ve ever seen

sprawled out on skin rugs

waiting to be served by people

my age, cutting carrots

in black uniforms

and moving through the crowd

with trays of hors d’oeuvres

and champagne

and I can see how far I am

from them as the onions

are again starting to simmer,

the glasses are clinging

in celebration, and the knives

dream poignant and bright.

I can remember that life,

the one inside of this one,

and so I must think also

of the one still to come.

Here, with all my cells—

the multitudes of lightlessness

traveling through me

to which I’ve strapped every

desire and loss,

I listen to the wind saying

Come with me, be the air

for a little while. Here,

everything has a voice

if you hold your ear to it

or place the pads of your fingers

against it to feel the music

tremble. Sometimes when I am alone,

reading a stack of old poems and listening

to a passing truck headed

to who knows where,

I lace up my boots

to walk through the woods.

I like how everything

starts to sing if I’m quiet enough

and so even the discolored grasses,

the decurrent spindles of lichens, even this

stray hair of starlight, they have a song,

the living and the dead. And there is

a hum on the rusted Massey Ferguson

and on the scuffed asbestos tiles

of the forgot-about hospital

and in the ditches where

the stones have turned blind

as the sun through the haze of clouds.

And as I walk I know there is music

made of the way I open the air

and the day waits, unafflicted before me,

stepping onto the high ridgeline

listening for my country.