Like snow, I was born in the distant belly of a mother I never knew as well as when, point by lovely point, I was forming myself inside her. I came from nowhere, fell softly on new air. I did not know where the drift of weather or the iron tide of chance would carry me. I fell far beyond my own control, giddy with release. I was most myself in this my only falling onto our earth.

Snow's depth is the instant shape it gives a thing: what snow touches shifts, just slightly, bringing the sweet pleasure of merest change, the way a human will touch a human lightly on the wrist and that day is different, slightly and forever:

I am one among many, our lives linked, as drifting snow is linked, in mutual need and fallen beauty.

It's so quiet it's almost frightening; in the tawny biscuit color of evening, great green

leaf clusters lean in at us, a windchime across the street speaks up

a blue scale and down. A child goes by on a bicycle, whizzing. Then two students

in sneakers, nudging each other.

But here we are nearly immobile. Huge mattresses of silence slide out under our bodies

and lift us, and float across the lawn as if we'd been hollowed out, drawn

into thin filaments of ourselves, vague faces listening

like automatic antennae quivering . . .

At nine o'clock, ten o'clock, it's still bright and suddenly menacing: a fast car

suddenly whisks by

as Sentinel Hill looks down over its shoulders at the shadows beginning to slip

between houses: in the mild lion light of summer

on porches all over town

the people next door pop in and out unexpectedly, they run errands

all day long but now nothing, after a quick

juicy giggle, the slow dying-away fall of a low voice on the corner, some stranger

saying good night, the quietness spreads out everywhere, when everyone disappears

in summer, after work where do they go?

Sitting quietly on their porches

or asleep, no longer present any more than the leaves bowing

and nodding absently to each other,

for all the brain's endless intercellular whisperings,

strands of protein rustling and waving back and forth like wheat,

the mind in its windy armchair murmuring barely believes in itself:

as slow water drops from the dark lavender petunias

in their K-Mart pots above us,

high overhead, in the black backyards of space, cerebral circuits flash

and babble to themselves, lonely

as far-off satellites, blind sparks blinking, signaling across the night

She begins, and my grandmother joins her. Mother and daughter sing like young girls. If my father were alive, he would play his accordion and sway like a boat.

I've never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace, nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung; how the waterlilies fill with rain until they overturn, spilling water into water, then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry. But neither stops her song.