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.