Snowchild, why do you cry,your tears already ice, your mind held open all night by the tremors and the worries,a frigid dark, a path walked alone, a memory pinned to the black of the sky.

Family pains, and why is there no still and quiet place to go and rest, to take up a new day,no more of the fighting, only love enough, only peace enough, to cool the burning mind.I am my brother's keeper; I gather what strength I can for him and for me toward some happiness,and the dark comes in, and lifts, and comes back in again to prove us wrong,and I go down to the lowest point and look a long while into the icy nothing,and I thank the ones who made me smile, and still all I can do is cry.

Enough of this, enough, stop the senseless noise of it;no child was ever meant to grow up alone and afraid,so I sit at the cold glass and watch the snow come down until the crying stops.

I miss the years of being young, when not knowing kept the worst of it away,when we could race the hill and ski the bright thin cold and nothing seemed about to change.

Freezing mornings, my face already wet from dreams more real than the waking ever is,and the pain has come to stay, I know it, because the tremors never once went quiet.

The happy images crowd in, the ones that make me weep,and there is nothing left, there is nothing more, I could not have dreamed a time like this.

So stay alone, then, stay clear of all the ones who spend the daylight cheap,alone at night, at peace only when the pain is close and honest,or in the thin hours when I let myself want better things,unable to get past these days no matter how many of them fall behind me.

A whole world goes down, the one I sowed and raised in years I could not believe were mine,and the wreck of it strikes me blind, past all believing,and here is a grief past any tremor in the mind:the losing of the boy that never cried, the brother, who held it in to the very end of his time,his light still somewhere out in the dark, still crossing it, not yet arrived,and I hope, I hope there is more.

I want to run from the whole of how I feel,from all I never said to him before that last cold solstice,and the air has gone so still that not even the wind will rise to carry it off,so I say it into the falling white instead: no more, no more wasting angels in December's snow.

Snowchild, the long unbroken night is going out of me at last,not in the single blaze the old hymns promised,but the way the ice unclenches, hour by hour, in the blue before the birds,a small water starting in the eaves that I mistake, half waking, for my own slow thaw.

The shaking is still in me when I wake, the old hand at the stem of the skullthat learned my name beneath the surgeon's lamp and would not afterward give it back,but I no longer order it gone. I let it stay, and breathe,and the first long breath of the year goes in cold and comes back warm and becomes the air,the plainest and most forgotten mercy, the one we never praiseuntil the night we are not certain we can take another.

A green thing is forcing the gray lid of the snow,half frozen and unkillable and indecent in its wanting,and I did not plant it, I did nothing to deserve it, and still it came,the way the light comes down across a dark field asking no one's leave,the way the help arrives, always too late for someone, and still, for someone, in time.

The wind that would not rise the whole long winter rises now off the loosening river,and the old line is true, and I will say it plainly: the wind is rising, I must try to live.I draw the bolt I threw against the world and let the raw cold air come in,and the ones I sent away come back across the threshold like the light returning to a room.

The boy that never cried is gone, the brother I was given and not by blood,and no green hour hands him back. But I have learned what the dead stars keep teachingwhoever is patient enough to stand out in the cold and look up:that the light goes on arriving long after the fire that made it has gone black,and his is still crossing the dark toward me, still on its way, not yet arrived,and I carry him up out of December into the lengthening day,the way he kept telling me, even near the end, to live.

And the seam at the back of my head, the place where they closed me and let me keep going,is beginning, in this thin new light, to take a little gold.

Snowchild, look at you, out in the long gold afternoon of the year,your sleeves shoved past the elbow, the cold gone to a countryyou used to live in and swore, beneath the lamp, you would die in, and did not.

For years I did not believe in summer. I rationed what hope I hadthe way a man crossing a desert counts the swallows left in the canteen,and here it is regardless, the whole unearned extravagance, the air gone thick with cut grass and cicada,the lake keeping the day's heat long past nightfall, so you can wade out past the dockinto the warm black water and, for once in your life, not be afraid of the dark.

I flinch still at a door slammed two rooms off. The body keeps the longer ledger,truer than the mind, and for half a second I am back beneath the white lamp on the table,but the gladness did not come to wipe that out. That was never the bargain.It came to make the room bigger. Most days now, the plain ones I have stopped countingbecause they have stopped being rare, I hold the wound in the one hand and the warmth in the other,and I do not, the way I used to, drop either.

We drive the back roads with the windows down and someone I lovesings every word of it wrong into the rising wind, and I do not correct her.I have seen, the way the woman in the film saw her whole life at once in a stranger's tongue,exactly how all of it ends, the heat, the singing, the handful I would lay my life down for,and knowing the end of it line by line, I would not give back one cicada evening to be spared the grief.

The boy that never cried would be a man now, broad in the shoulder, unbearable, alive.Since he cannot be, I pour the second glass and set it sweating in the grass for him,and his light keeps arriving across the years the way the light of a dead star does,long after the source, and the night goes gold along its edge, and no one is keeping the score.

I used to lie awake and count the hours down to the merciful dark.Now I lose whole evenings and cannot tell you where they went,and that squandering, that careless luminous waste of an ordinary breath,is the thing the friend who is gone once meant, when he asked me to picture my best day.It was never loud. It was only ever this. It was always going to be only this.

Snowchild, the light comes in low and sidelong now, gold and brief and already leaving,the way everything worth the loving is always leaving even as you hold it,and I have put the long argument down at last and stopped asking it to stay.

This is the season of the gleaning. I gather what the year in fact gave meand not the ransom I once screamed for: the few who stayed when the staying cost them,the mornings I was sure I would not wake to and woke to all the same,a handful of poems, a hand that shakes a little less, a way of meaning thank youall the way to the floor of me. The orchard does not grieve its falling;the fruit goes heavy, gives, is taken, and the bough is not ashamed of being bare.

The leaves let go without an argument. They had their green and spent the whole of it,they kept nothing back against the cold, they are not afraid of the ground,and I, who wasted years afraid of the ground, am trying, late and clumsy and in earnest,to learn my own dying from a tree.

I keep a place laid at the table for the ones the dark took early,and I hear you in the keeping, brother, in the one rule you left me before the road:that everything we are handed in this life we are meant, in the end, to hand on,that the help came too late for you, and so I must become the help that comes in time,the note that reaches the far room before the lamp goes out in it,and the table, you would not believe the table, is so much fuller than it looks.

The wind is rising again off the stripped fields, carrying the first clean edge of the snow,and here is the whole astonishment of my one and only life:knowing how the story ends, knowing the winter is already turning back for me,I would choose it, all of it, every frozen and luminous mile, and choose it again.I am not the child who feared it. The child is in me still, and is no longer afraid.

I have buried things and grown things, lost you and kept your arriving light,and the old man I may yet become, if I am given the years, will ask one thing of all of it:did I send on more light than I took. Let the answer, when it comes, be yes.For I have learned at the last what the snow was always trying to tell the child:that the breath gives itself back as air, that the borrowed light goes on,that we are each of us handed the flame for one cold hour and then we pass it on,and that to have stood here at all, even broken, even briefly, in the falling and the gold,was the whole and the only gift, and was enough.