The Weather This Spring

The weather this spring has been rotten; I don't know

when I have

Ever before set such store by something so trivial

As a warm day in the sun.

Past March, past April the cold has clung to us.

Stalks are still limp in the gardens, trees are still bare.

Of the color of gray not anything, persons,

Places or things are spared, and if souls

Live at all they do so in gray, gray holes.

But words?

At office and bank, in classroom and parlor

They saunter around us in shirt-sleeves, tanned and

toothy,

Greeting each other sociably through the overcast

As if some sun of theirs, not ours, still glinted,

Making meaning bearable.

How do they manage it?

Words, words, words-are they not

Mined underneath, like us, by the season's rot? Must

they not

Let God's one gray Word stain their

Many-colored chaff, their polyglot?

They say no,

Being ungodly. They say they

Have their own souls, Webster says so, heaven's

Not for them; and so they pay

No mind to the seasons, and go their way,

Leaving the rest of us, gray and envious, wishing

We too were fools,

And could weather it through with our own set of rules.