Yuki! Yuki! Yuki!

Blessing; snow. The sounds that don’t wake me up
in morning.
Little taps on eyelids and hair cells with tips of fingers,
little sweeping hands on ivory keys.

No one heard the Fugue in the night when he died.
Little pricks of blessed snow: It was the sounds
that didn’t wake me up.

That night in muddy water he imagined the piano by the window
and his wife’s scarf wrapped around his granddaughter’s head.
The first Christmas she decided not to trust;
her faith washed away like his life in the river.

Japanese chants trickle by and all she can understand
about a blessing
is the snow, a winter to end all.

Little slender fingers around mallets don’t pound out funeral melodies
but songs mimicking the way water moves.
All tears will be different, frozen. All rain drops become their own
when it’s cold enough.

The simplicity of Japanese folk songs is the ominous quiet
before the gusts and crashes of night;
the kind of silence one feels he must grab hold of.

The piano by the window swells with tiny frozen notes
that come through the window and melt into the wood.
Who taught his granddaughter to play this box? She sings
of cities, her fingers a flurry to rest on a black-and-white landscape.

She’s sorry about the ice. Or, she wishes she was sorry about ice.
But she lives a winter without the burdens of a birth she never found all that

fascinating.

Little Japanese blessings nestle into the scarf woven into her hair,
the Western canon shaken off like loose flakes that dissolve into the floor,
swelling the wood in obscure ridges like Braille for bare feet.

A death she foresaw.

Rolling the plastic baby Jesus over on her tongue
to discover the gustations of a miracle,
she leaves the table of a dozen people who fear they might have
consumed sacrilege.

Little hands clap together to spark an epiphany;
all she can remember is that her grandfather was too young.
The look of a river with a million plastic dolls floating through
all she knows is religion let her grandfather die too young.

She only wanted the blessing of moving water.

The only blessings are frozen.
Little farmer folk songs ring through the trees,
a peasant’s queen
steps into the river, her Christmas dress unfurling,
a blossom in the muddy water.

Wading to where her grandfather should have died
on a faithless holiday
all that kiss the surface are little rimy blessings.