You’ll Notice

Odd Fellows Hall
Nashua, New Hampshire

You’ll Notice

Blue was your kindly spirit—not a ghoul

But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

…

You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.

                                                                Ted Hughes

                                                                Red

I know the snow on the lip of the brick

on each I.O.O.F seven stories up

is clung to in every crack, is stacked

and will melt back to water

when the warm rain’s finally come.  How

tropical almost, 48+

degrees in the middle of January,

and one continuous persistent breeze

being fingered below by the leafless

street trees.  (in another poem i want to
say how street trees are different
from park trees and park trees are

different from yard trees and yard
trees are different from woods...)
Don’t you want to be above 

ground and beneath such rain,

head bare, chin up

to it all, open your mouth, the offering

so small but soft as that
almost spring

rain?  You're waiting for it,
I can tell.  I’m sending you out.  Go

coatless.  Last week’s blizzard,

(actually, it was only four days ago)

is almost melted off.  I can tell that
too, although it’s still dark.  The rain sounds

edgy, like last year’s

weasel teeth, struck to on all the attic wires,

squeezing and grating against everything
that's insulated above my head: soon the copper’s

in the raw, soon the hiss might not be

rain but the ecstatic beginnings

of a flame, a small glossa crawling out

on the beam where the house

is giving its ribs to be roof and hood
beneath the nearly new shingles.  Flick

a switch, if you're keen on seeing
magic that's vermin leaving nothing
but scat.  But ignore it.  Ignore the
funk.  Ignore the dust you'll cough

out of your lungs.  Stand still. Unless it’s slick,
which this brilliant wind and warm
make claims for, stand still.   

Just days ago it was nearly 15 below

zero.  Take it.  Take it I tell you, under
the sod, or onto the water still
reluctant to give in to February.  Soon ice will be
pushed up the bank and break open

the way skin does when it's too tight
and dry, too tired even to cry...but leaving
that hood, that lip of itself open
for a weasel, for an eagle, for a small

beak of a young goose to reach
into and pull a tuft of something,
who knows what all, into its mouth
hold it while it goes warm, hold it

like alphabets in brick holding snow,
holding their own Odd, century-old own.

Broke Open