Sweeping

Sweeping

Only brooms

Know the devil

Still exhists,

That the snow grows whiter

After a crow has flown over it…

                                                Charles Simic

                                                Brooms

Maybe sweeping  becomes innate

when heaping the random bits and blow-

ins make the way as safe coming

as they do going.  It’s how

you welcome a guest, by the pristine

boarders you keep, these and your

crisp invitations:

see the lines are straight and safe

to my door and to the warm

way in.  It takes years

of practice.  Of heaving off detritus.

Of watching for the snow you’ll event-

ually shove off, all those flakes that fall, fall, fall

all winter gathering just to take

themselves into the melt of spring

to make monuments for the sky who has

offered so liberally of herself,

and to shape them like they are understood

all along, even, especially, as they melt

away,  the way a bear melts

into her woods, or a bird into her branches

each of  their coming in and going out

driven by appetite

or fatigue, tongue or loin,

beneath this sky and alongside

a quiet eye, without deciding what all

it will become as it is met

and swept off, a shovel or blade or broom

straw, the way known before the hand

takes up with the handle

with the strictest of confidences

and not a word, not a single word,

except maybe shhhh, shhhh, shhhh,

shhh, shhh, shhh;             shhh, shhh,

shhh      hhh,                              hh,   h