Seasons Among the Tribes (18)

And now even, at snow's end, cafes regenerate,

the traps of adventure trailing

away in the bowed music. I might, he thinks,

have dreamt myself so cold,

have dreamt as many waves, made powdery

on beach stones, dissembling time and loss

as all the powders vivify, a people kneeling to pray

or say their gratitude for water, as used

as consequent, feeling the sway of birthdays

and long-married harmonics,

and stepping into it, and into the new snow,

remembering as he will, finding

the immense yellow moon like risk in the tall limbs,

the snow cracking underfoot

through the whole of oakwood. A man

remembers what he will, beneath

the eye of God, the clefs of such a music, watches

their faces on day-baked streets, kids

who must have dreamt themselves so cold,

crying as kids in tongues

against the desert-studded dark, remembering faces

and that music to the last days of their lives,

their bodies, like white convertibles,

beside a white garage, invisible to start,

in conversations idling, in the voices of the women

coming home again to whisper,

women come to dance, as if learning

the ways to love

should not have made a difference,

as if the motion of the human

were but a smooth

drugged birth.