I don't know why the snow line stops a few feet short of every
house.
No doubt there is a simple explanation. Something to do with
the warmth inside
melting the snow before we noticed it. But there is still the
surprise that it does.
As though it obeyed an order given long ago; a little
forbearance shown us
by an otherwise indifferent God, caught on a good day and in
a better mood.
How a man sitting at home alone one evening might take a
familiar book
from the shelf and, opening it at an accustomend place, see for
the first time
something he never saw before. And believe he has misread it
or projected his own
interpretations onto the printed page, but look again and see he
read correctly
what the the writer always meant to say and realize that in that instant
he was never alone,
through it all, and never feel that solitude again.
Or see his mortality written on his children's foreheads
and not mind
the years creeping up on him and accept the minor role from
then on
with gratitude and a certain humility, feeling somehow
honored by it.
How even grief may teach us something, wisdom, if it has to,
and leave us cleaner
and the better for it. Able to wonder at incongruities or the
merely insignificant.
To look for the evidence of miracles in the most ordinary
events of our lives; something holy
in snow lines stopping short of every house. Even the empty,
the apparently abandoned ones.
February 1993
This poem is excerpted from STUBBORN LIGHT: THE BEST OF THE
SUN, VOLUME III. Check out The Sun Magazine at
www.thesunmagazine.org
