At the Office Early

Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ball-point pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass,
I'll hear the soft piano
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickels and dimes.

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by Ted Koozer, 1985

A Chair in Snow

A chair in snow
should be
like any other objected whited
& rounded

and yet a chair in snow is always sad

more than a bed
more than a hat or house
a chair is shaped for just one thing

to hold
a soul its quick and few bendable
hours

perhaps a king

not to hold snow
not to hold flowers

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by Jane Hirshfield, 2013

The End

The last thing of you is a doll, velveteen and spangle,
silk douponi trousers, Ali Baba slippers that curl up at the toes,
tinsel moustache, a doll we had made in your image
for our wedding with one of me which you have.
They sat atop our coconut cake. We cut it
into snowy squares and fed each other, while God watched.

All other things are gone now: the letters boxed,
pajama-sized shirts bagged for Goodwill, odd utensils
farmed to graduating students starting first apartments
(citrus zester, apple corer, rusting mandoline),
childhood pictures returned to your mother,
trinkets sorted real from fake and molten
to a single bar of gold, untruths parsed,
most things unsnarled, the rest let go

save the doll, which I find in a closet,
examine closely, then set into a hospitable tree
which I drive past daily for weeks and see it still there,
in the rain, in the wind, fading in the sun,
no one will take it, it will not blow away,

in the rain, in the wind,

it holds tight to its branch,

then one day, it is gone.

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by Elizabeth Alexander

An Architecture

Like a room, the clear stanza
of birdsong opens among the noises
of motors and breakfasts.

Among the light's beginnings,
lifting broken gray of the night's
end, the bird hastens to his song

as to a place, a room commenced
at the end of sleep. Around
him his singing is entire.

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by Wendell Berry, 1964