Summer is almost here. I'm writing again.

Song

Upstairs my husband
plays a riff in a minor key
which I once explained to my students is
the key of sorrows, but also
revery. Outside the sky is
mute in wooly nimbus beds
and an osprey rises in widening gyros
above the little pond where every Spring
the State dumps farmed trout
that are gone by summer.

All day we have stayed at home.
No business to take us further than the barn
or garden. The clouds have hidden all the contrails
of the planes bound for Europe---
Crows have fed on the robins' worms.

It isn't that we don't care to travel.
Sometime we simply cannot think
of where to go, or why to leave the room.
Still, all day I've been remembering
the Adriatic; mowed meadows
running down to that blue---
the tattered scatter
rug we found beside the road, its fringe
half torn, pattern obscured
by a thousand fallen olive blossoms.

Not a prayer rug; a prayer.
I carried it all the way back
here. Upstairs, song ended,
I hear the click of case clasps---
footfall down the stairs.