9th & 10th December, 2004
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Rod in “The Best is Yet to Come” 11/6/04
Photo by Shira Greenburg ©2004 by Broadway.com. Used by Permission
A Thought for Today
Don’t forget to say and save a prayer and
to send a greeting to our servicemen and women keeping the peace around
the world this holiday season.
FROM the¨BOOKS
TWO POEMS from AND TO EACH SEASON
The Coming of the Rain
It seems as though
the rain has not begun
and yet that it will never stop.
So much love has passed between us
that we’ve made the afternoon
last through half the night
by moving back and forth
across each other
again and time again.
I’d love to fill you to the brim
so that you’d be always full
and spilling over,
then I could know for sure
no interloper however tall
weaving through the distance
would find shelter in you
from the next November rain
or hide your body
from the long
September shadows
with his own.
And still it rains
as though the sky’s let go
for always.
A thoughtful rain
as I go back to bed
and you go off
to make a chocolate cake.
The rain that I had damned
all morning,
I bless tonight.
Don’t wake me if I fall asleep
even if your fist
is full of frosting.
Ent’re Act
We were in love that summer
and birds about the sky
were singing with themselves,
carols I cannot remember,
though I do recall
the color of the trees
and the things I thought
but never said to you.
I thought of San Francisco
and the bridge being painted
even when it wasn’t spring.
I thought about
the loneliness of oceans,
of Colorado snow
and writing a book called
Where Can I Go.
Everything but us.
We were a fact
and not to be embellished on,
or thought about.
Now I remember
you liked brandy
and Bruckner
and beer,
and painting Mt. Baker
as it sank into the fog.
You liked little boys
and skipping breakfast
(unless we made it for ourselves).
In that whole season
as warm day followed warm day
I never thought about
tomorrow or next year.
Of course you never do
when it’s happening for you,
and it was happening
for both of us.
When did we stumble,
where did we turn
when did we stop
as though we’d never started?
It was, I think,
somewhere near
September’s end.
Other people started
getting in between us,
almost as though
we hadn’t locked the gate.
Thinking back now
I may have even come upon
an answer to the why.
Sometimes being happy
seems a self-indulgence.
When on every side of you
the world seems wrapped in wrong,
it becomes a bending burden
to go on smiling
or to smile at all
even for the one you love.
We had friends
who never laughed,
not because there was a war -
there was,
but then there always is.
But fun had lost
a button off its pants,
the first one,
and none of us were making any effort
to sew it on again.
- from "And To Each Season,"1972
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