Winter

For my father


We are taller in the last sweet drape of light;
the setting sun gives us long shadows.
Right now my view is alpine, unfettered snow
on hills, clouds willing to swim in the darkening sky,
and all those trees, their naked branches
thin white shelves. Isn't all ground a cemetery
of fallen leaves and bits of bone? Who wouldn't believe
that gods rise from the dead as we begin
our descent into winter knowing that spring
will give us grass again? The shivering tongues
of rhododendron leaves will be reborn,
the same with the rusty fists of hydrangea.
A darkening mosaic of dying, that bitterness
always there. Soon, the sun will move farther west,
and tomorrow it will rise again, always the sun returns.
Even on the morning after you died.
The way everyone went about their day,
buying toothpaste and shampoo
as I drove listening to Fly Me to the Moon
and watched the gauzy cell of a real moon
hanging in the blue sky all the way home, alone.