In the last hour of this ordinary day
The blue ginger flowers by the pool
Cease shaking and grow quiet, as they color with rain.
It is an old garden. The years have been slow
That gave these green cypresses time to be tall
Over a stone bench hidden by lilies.
I have one daughter and three sons, whose lives are my solace.
Their kindness scatter around me
Like the small leaves tossing away from the raintree.
Their beauty deepens as these tropic days do
Around the pool. I can leave them now,
Trusting their happiness enough.
What is this shivering? Presage? Or ghosts
Crossing? Or a gust of winter?
But winter will never come this far south.
Winter will not come, nor love by cold light
Wrestled from ice and hardened in the North Wind,
The sky ringing like struck rock.
To live without winter.: Who lives here has to learn how.
To be daily at peace in the sun,
Or else, since there's no coming back, leave the garden forever
To hazard the crystalline reaches where there is no haven
In the stony air from blizzards, sheer lakes, white cataracts,
Or the amorous knives of the snow.
I'll stay no longer with ghosts in their green garden
But go where winter-beaten flakes out of blind heaven
Obscure the nightfall, the more gently for the strange cold.
There's such kindness in the snow's gestures, and such need for it,
In the wind that sweeps the wastes far from here-
Winter's unsparing country.