Valentine’s Day Blizzard
for Tommy
All afternoon it snowed, then
such power came down from the clouds
on a yellow thread,
as authoritative as God is supposed to
be.
When it hit the tree, her body
opened forever.
“Rain”
by Mary Oliver
Love is five
below
zero – wool covers of gloves
of muffs above the mouth
of a month
of almost nothing
but
snow and the way it falls
on
the hip high head high
banks
and rests as is, simply there,
falling
bodies long in arriving. Isn’t it
something,
stepping out
into it
without wind,
isn’t it
something when it says what it is
what it is exactly,
instead of opening
that box in
a box, when it’s all
paper,
all solemn at the bottom
as
though the arrival of the season
were
a rumor, even though under
all
this snow it has always been
there,
not coming from the sky
like
we’d supposed, but from
the
solid as silver ground
and yes we’d known all
along it was
there, right? and our
clearing and plowing was
the only way we could
keep
our edges,
whose sharp corners,
dull
and blunt now with winter,
are
buried in a throb of moist
canals
we once, from summer
(really
spring, who do we fool)
into
fall shouldered down
without
thinking, fresh
and
stripped, and like all
Augusts,
hot. But Fuck it’s still
February. We’re still in
the middle of it all,
still
shoveling this
white
shit up
against
the bare sugar
maple,
naked as we want
to
be, limbs spread to
a
sky passing on without
stopping
or notice, except
that
what it spills,
windless or not
stays while it
moves on
as though the baby, needing
rocking, isn’t
hers.
The
blizzard,
my
dears, is on
its
way. Bake
bread. Pour
the
wine. Take it
into
your lips
while
you still
absolutely
must.
Outside is
a long long way
from hand
to mouth. Stay where five
below is on the other
side
of the
glass, where wool
dries
near the fire, beads
of
ice like sweat, like hips
and
limbs all shadow
all
arrival, are falling
falling
down, stepping
(let
it!) sweetly in
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