90. January wind

January Wind
The January wind has a hundred voices.
It can scream, it can bellow, it can whisper,
and it can sing a lullaby.
It can roar through the leafless oaks
and shout down the hillside,
and it can murmur in the white pines
rooted among the granite ledges
where lichen makes strange hieroglyphics.
It can whistle down a chimney
and set the hearth flames to dancing.
On a sunny day it can pause in a sheltered spot
and breathe a promise of spring and violets.
In the cold of a lonely night it can rattle the sash and stay there
muttering of ice and snowbanks and deep-frozen ponds.
Sometimes the January wind seems to come
from the farthest star in the outer darkness,
so remote and so impersonal is its voice.
That is the wind of a January dawn,
in the half-light that trembles between day and night.
It is a wind that merely quivers the trees,
its force sensed but not seen,
a force that might almost hold back the day if it were so directed.
Then the east brightens, and the wind relaxes-
the stars, its source, grown dim.
And sometimes the January wind is so intimate
that you know it came only from the next hill,
a little wind that plays with leaves and puffs at chimney smoke
and whistles like a little boy with puckered lips.
It makes the little cedar trees quiver, as with delight.
It shadow-boxes with the weather-vane.
It tweaks an ear,
and whispers laughing words about crocuses and daffodils,
and nips the nose and dances off.
But you never know, until you hear its voice,
which wind is here today.
Or, more important, which will be here tomorrow.