Dear Ones—a warm wind
is melting the layers of snow
and the young mule deer
is foraging mouthfuls of windfalls—
branchlets re-emerging
in the shrinking crust
that an earlier Chinook
shook from the pines—
how the layers of time
accumulate, condense,
become common ground.
Raven calling overhead,
red squirrel rushing from tree
to tree, the sun fingering
a line of snowbank here and there,
lighting up a low strip of bark,
reaching into our warming lives—
this morning casting pink
into the mountaintops
as the moon, past full, set
behind their glow—and we're tuned
at last to the cycle of light,
finding the rhythm of our days.