White Rain (forty years since our meeting)

“Even death may prove unreal at the last, 
and stoics [be] astounded into Heaven.” 
—Herman Melville 

We wake to cold, though it’s mid-spring, 
so silent at sunrise 
we both raise the pleated blinds 
and look out: everything a shock 
of ice . . . each draped petal and twig 
from weeping cherry, wire on the chain link 
fence—evenly glazed and still. 

Yesterday there were birds 
and paper-winged moths. 
The new nest in a birch sits too high 
to see inside. But with the image of blue eggs 
coated with ice, I see how some pain holds 
a requiting kind of beauty: the newborn 
named for my father—gone four years. 

In a spring so like any other (showers 
and a little wind), the chores of pruning and tilling
are taking us longer, but suddenly 
with the melt of freezing rain 
a repeated wonder of grass 
comes back, and brittle branches 
go supple with green. 

An hour of sun spurs sensation 
toward the unspeakable languages of spirit 
like a touch of pollen when you discard Sunday’s vase
of dead flowers. Or the way by afternoon 
in the young wheat of Horse Heaven Hills, 
though we hardly feel a breeze, 
a whole field sways.