What It Means to You

For a moment and then

Briers at best bitterly

Exhort night for other laughter

And yesterday still under snow

Listens for daybreak's inscription

Its cold passage

When trees itch with winter sparrows

Quickening the slowness of dawn

You think you know what it means

But not too soon at last

You know the impulsiveness of God

The beardless clear-eyed moon

Offering a subtle grin and the first

Dark speech of morning

To Have Waited without Really Knowing Why

And to have felt the word

These trees breathe forth one

Syllable maybe two or more who

Knows these patient trees

Reflected in the Big Lake?

And to have stood among the silent pines

That haunt the bottom of Lake Michigan

And there to have sought

God’s great pit of a heart

And in the drowned village of sweet

Severities to have come upon a soul

You didn’t know you sought

And to have heard her limpid music

Echo as from a dry well

And to have remembered that you came

From this town knowing nothing

But ditch burrs and dust roads

Brief angry summers and the interminable

Spite of winter

And never to forget

The ice in your mind in your throat

Melting at summer’s livid end

When flags hang wet

Despite this ashen heat

This gray sky waiting for rain