News of You

News of You

Your word arches over

the roof all day.  I know it

within my bowed head, where

the other sky listens.

You will bring me

everything when the time comes.

                                                                “Sky”

                                                                William Stafford

 

I’m doing my best not to make the news
of you

into a cliché

and lately, and maybe even before the day

I knew about your suddenly and without

delay, dying, it’s been

back into winter for me

and she and me

sometimes each conspiring with each
                and sometimes at odds:

                this is the time I finally realized

                                (after I’d put my gear away)

                that she'd been letting me

                slice right into her     shoulders     elbows     fists

                and lift her

                up and away

                but only heavily—with more and more weight

                                and many days of three or four shovels

                                full of snow to make it

                                six inches out and ahead.  It’s the same

                                every winter, beginning, although the older

                                I get she is more

                                intense and more

                                stubborn.  It’s the way we start out happy

                                and agree to sleep

                                only with each other every night

                                and it goes like that for months

                                                (even though she showed up early

                                                and I bowed to her and let her in

                                                what choice do I have really)

until nearing the end I didn’t want

to open the door to her

and so she waited
(patient ain's she) and fell into her old habits

of quietly (but for the wind

                                or rain

                                or sleet

                                or ice

                                or occasional moon, full-faced

piling up outside until finally

I’m hip deep in it with her

and fall down getting through

and want to sleep the sleep of all those men

who watch the captain Shackleton row out

                                walk out what did he do to get out?

                except not give in

and they let the glare of him work its way into them

for all those months

they stayed awake enough to live

and make it

out

alive.  And even though I’d like to   

I can’t seem to

say you’re the same

as all the rest who have died
before you did,

the ones I let fall off

into the melting snow

year after year

as I shoveled out

a path for myself to leave my house
to get older

come spring.

But something

                maybe that kindness you showed me

                all those years ago

took hold and built itself

into my flesh and bone—
(but painfully, because you left, even then)

                                like a small otter fused into the breast

                                of the eagle—how she'd swooped down one day

                                and they both made it all the way into the sky

                                to be eaten by one another for the rest

                                of their lives, until the teeth in the skull of one

                                fused to the bone of the other

It wasn’t like that for us

in fact it wasn’t like anything at all

for us—

you were the kind of guy who was kind

and shy

and I was the kind of girl who knew

and after that it was a long time

before we saw each other again—

and never in flesh

never again in flesh

I think maybe when the winter comes back

(and it’s only April so I’ve got time)

I’ll have reconciled you enough to lift you up

on the shovel and set you like a thought

melting

beneath the small Buddha statue I keep

beneath the maple tree.
But

I’ll need to shovel my way to it.  It's not on
my winter
walking out path.  And

the way is steep.

I hear you’ve already started

to ring the bell.  It’s soft.  I’ll be along.

The Three at Bancroft's Castle
Groton, Mass