Pondering the spring's green significance and the scent of frozen earth as it thaws, dark and thick; keeping tabs on the sun slowed in its great periplus of the sky; and watching for birds (swans, osprey, and snowy egrets) as they return to the shore; there is a song goes person to person, passed along like good news, a song about rebirth and all of our regeneration myths. The cycles of darkness and light mingle in the overwhelming green that saturates the new-sprung world; the green of leaves and grass, of tender buds and shoots.

When I step back under the overhang, out of the rain, there is a music the water in the drain makes; it is not like the singing of the birds or the whispering of the wind. There is no voice, no rosined bow drawn over taut strings. I hear only the sky courting the land, I hear its pleading, feel its soft cajoling. When the rain lifts there will be a white bird, with a long neck and beak, flying low. The promise will be in the unheard cry of the bird.

He lived in memories of trains, an ocean voyage, and a moon that wrinkled once across a mossy pond. In all his sentences he paid mind to echoes of the music he had heard, unmistakable but unknown phrases fingered on an old piano. Arpeggios long forgotten, succinct phrases tallied up. Oh, and he dined on thoughts that turned to melodies, listening for the cadences, remembering his mother and father in the front seat in the dark on the road a night, singing old songs in close harmony.