Descending softly over Icicle Creek, snow lingers,
a descant, in the still of cold mountain air.

Outside the cabin window, pale limbs of yearling birch
recall the early poems of Robert Frost
when earth was a pear-green place,
choice, common as seed.

Perhaps it's that I'm alone, reading
in the New York Times
Pavarottis remarried, has a new daughter,
a one-year old named Alice, left behind his first wife
and their three daughters in Padua.

Perhaps it's that my mother-in-law is slipping away,
a frail moon who won't eat,
while the shadow of my father lengthens
over California, touches the map where I was a child.

Or maybe it's the way the cabin's cedar siding is stained
by the charcoal rime of winter's jagged line,
deepening this song, a B flat minor melody,
strummed long ago, on a wayfarers guitar.
'
There, I, too, belong, with the tribe at the circle fire,
interludes of snow falling,
a descant in the still of cold mountain air.

- Denise Calvetti Michaels