"The End of Winter in an Old Neighborhood."
This poem is in two parts.
I'd move back to North Carolina after living
for a long, long time on the West Coast.
And I think that had something to do
with beginning to write a whole series of poems
about living in where I had when I was raised in the South.
And at this particular point it was
not-- it was not quite spring and I'd gotten a letter
from a grandmother who was in a rest home in Minnesota
describing a snowstorm.
And I was thinking just looking out the window
and seeing the bright lights seeing the almost summer
weather and becoming aware of living in a very old house.
And it would have felt somehow very strange to me
that I should be living-- that I should
be young living in a very old house and a very
old neighborhood, and she should be old
living in a brand new rest home and a brand
new suburban community up there in Minnesota.
"Today is not quite spring.
But now the March lit windows widen, show
the screen of thin dry twigs that flinch as sparrows hop.
Cracking birds perch like beetles split for flight.
Gables jut, bay windows belly out against the wind.
This neighborhood of ancient rooms
pulses as creatures flock, disband and come again one
by one to fill the twitching branches, the empty sunlit
rooms.
A green vine flowers along the twigs
steady on its ember claws.
And as the branches heave, the hook tips
catch it rise and the seasons tremble everywhere.
Today from Minnesota came a letter from grandmother.
Bright storms raged around us but they missed us
and we have a lovely Sunday morning nice and cool.
They're saddened by the stroke a patient had.
Last night she lost her voice and can't move her eyes.
My boy, you'd see my second childhood
if you could see me now.
I crawl along in bed quite on my own.
And in my infant fashion, and quite free,
I feel so free after these months stiffened in traction
and ridiculous in casts.
We even have some fun.
The wind changes direction often so the nurses
run opening and closing windows, asking how we feel.
Too warm, too cool.
Too late to write much more now I must nap.
And now we've had our evening meal.
One hears the car the clatter is like so many bones and pauses
and the opening and closing of the doors
to all the rooms as it passes, stops in silence.
Starts moving room by room along the hall.
At the end it waits for us to finish then
the clatter once again of glass on hard white steel.
They say my bones are hardening again.
Like sponge they were so soft I couldn't stand.
They wouldn't hold my body up.
I weigh just 95 now like I did when I was 20
and all day long I wear a nightie, this one or another.
But they're laundered here so often that they fade bleached
without light.
And how I miss the color of my hair,
scarlet mane your mother called it,
and your father, the burning bush.
So short now, they keep it cut so short.
It's good to be in bed with the moonlight on the snow.
Two pillows prop my head and the snow
is like a sheet that wraps the world.
The room is rather dim.
The other patients sleep and I must
close or I will wake and think this letter was a dream
and write again and say this all again.
But I could feel how a winter's nearly over."