Everything turns up in me in time
As a month will ride the refrigerator door
For months into winter, heading home. The furnace,
Which is nearly too close for comfort when it comes on,
Moves secrets truer than functions inside the room
By every one of which I’m to be warned and drawn,
And though this is impossible because none is there
Gradually they lay up their own temper anyhow
As if to prove, “Meantime, this is the way rest is:
On a siding an empty flatcar will fill with snow.”
For a person, it gets to be a matter of concern
Being the transport of too many arguments not your own
And under a season patiently endured (piling up,
Melting away, piling up and melting away)
It’s natural to envy the pitch of pure integrity,
How it would be living under that roof—
The weight of the climate slipped from the eaves
Along with the snow. Not to feel the weather,
How would that feel? To be tuned to a shape
Long since assumed, sure, single, in from the wind.
There are people like this, steep with intent
And valid as of that entry long ago. Each time
They are more engagingly unreal, these precious others
Who persist unrearranged, unregistering. Still,
To be in is to miss the way the day went
And this is so: the “as ifness” of the world is real,
Productive, wherever it comes from can’t be ignored
Though it may work against the solidest masonry,
The oldest of fieldstone farmhouse walls. The manner
Of meaning is its drift from whatever it means with,
The same as a snowdrift elaborates wind
Out of obstacles to the wind, being altered daily
To be annually kept true. Not to be of that climate
Though, how would that be? An accurate morning
Unintervened, a color alike indoors as out,
And the sound of somebody spinning their tires
Neither to come for me nor as if to go.