WEBVTT

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"The End of Winter in
an Old Neighborhood."

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This poem is in two parts.

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I'd move back to North
Carolina after living

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for a long, long time
on the West Coast.

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And I think that
had something to do

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with beginning to write
a whole series of poems

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about living in where I had
when I was raised in the South.

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And at this particular
point it was

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not-- it was not quite spring
and I'd gotten a letter

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from a grandmother who was
in a rest home in Minnesota

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describing a snowstorm.

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And I was thinking just
looking out the window

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and seeing the bright lights
seeing the almost summer

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weather and becoming aware of
living in a very old house.

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And it would have felt
somehow very strange to me

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that I should be
living-- that I should

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be young living in a
very old house and a very

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old neighborhood,
and she should be old

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living in a brand new
rest home and a brand

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new suburban community
up there in Minnesota.

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"Today is not quite spring.

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But now the March lit
windows widen, show

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the screen of thin dry twigs
that flinch as sparrows hop.

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Cracking birds perch like
beetles split for flight.

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Gables jut, bay windows
belly out against the wind.

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This neighborhood
of ancient rooms

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pulses as creatures flock,
disband and come again one

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by one to fill the twitching
branches, the empty sunlit

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rooms.

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A green vine flowers
along the twigs

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steady on its ember claws.

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And as the branches
heave, the hook tips

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catch it rise and the
seasons tremble everywhere.

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Today from Minnesota came
a letter from grandmother.

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Bright storms raged around
us but they missed us

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and we have a lovely Sunday
morning nice and cool.

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They're saddened by the
stroke a patient had.

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Last night she lost her voice
and can't move her eyes.

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My boy, you'd see
my second childhood

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if you could see me now.

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I crawl along in
bed quite on my own.

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And in my infant
fashion, and quite free,

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I feel so free after these
months stiffened in traction

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and ridiculous in casts.

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We even have some fun.

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The wind changes direction
often so the nurses

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run opening and closing
windows, asking how we feel.

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Too warm, too cool.

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Too late to write much
more now I must nap.

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And now we've had
our evening meal.

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One hears the car the clatter
is like so many bones and pauses

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and the opening and
closing of the doors

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to all the rooms as it
passes, stops in silence.

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Starts moving room by
room along the hall.

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At the end it waits
for us to finish then

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the clatter once again of
glass on hard white steel.

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They say my bones
are hardening again.

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Like sponge they were so
soft I couldn't stand.

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They wouldn't hold my body up.

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I weigh just 95 now
like I did when I was 20

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and all day long I wear a
nightie, this one or another.

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But they're laundered here so
often that they fade bleached

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without light.

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And how I miss the
color of my hair,

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scarlet mane your
mother called it,

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and your father,
the burning bush.

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So short now, they
keep it cut so short.

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It's good to be in bed with
the moonlight on the snow.

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Two pillows prop my
head and the snow

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is like a sheet that
wraps the world.

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The room is rather dim.

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The other patients
sleep and I must

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close or I will wake and
think this letter was a dream

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and write again and
say this all again.

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But I could feel how a
winter's nearly over."

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