Hardheaded Weather

1.

These leaves which have yellowed and are aloft

Or waving like bright hands at their stems as I drive my

Small red car under this raw and whipped

November sky.

And the wag of the bare branch,

The argument between the wind

And what the wind desires to push,

The sleet, the hardheaded weather,

This landscape, curling toward sleep.

2.

A year has passed since you died, and you died, and you.

I steer towards my house upstate.

Friends, who ever thought

That I'd own doors you won't open,

Floors never to carry your tread?

3.

My CD player does its random shuffle,

A traditional folk song rumbles the glass,

And I think of Whitman, nursing his wounded boys

At the military hospital, his poetic romance of death

Now a kid's thready breath he can't repair, or a young hand he grips

Until all the possibility in it lays cold.

Here is my middle-aged throat, singing along as I drive,

Singing to you.