The summer we met you wrote:
what it would be like to wake with a lover
as accustomed as the sparrow’s serenade
beautiful in its simplicity
dear in its ordinariness
Fourteen winters on
you call to me, urgent, from somewhere downstairs
deep in the recess of our house — go quick! to the kitchen
window! go! go! look!
I put down my pen, set aside the poem I am
always trying to write, reach the pane as your awestruck
voice fills the house: snow sparrows! snow sparrows!
— they are unlike any bird — part seagull, robin, polar fox —
tramping out a crisscrossed code in the snow,
never before seen in these parts, but they have found
our house, the one where every inch of lawn
is rock garden, flower bed or fish pond, all the work
of your hand and green thumb. The first three days
of this newborn arctic spring, they light rare awe-
some beauty on our simple, accustomed, ordinary life.
