March 7, my father’s 88th birthday today in what is doubtlessly sunny New Mexico. So much for my plans, months ago, to visit him on this day.

Here’s the thing about living such a long life — I could pick countless numbers of things to write about, but what I woke up thinking about this morning was how my dad would often say, “Let’s go for a walk around the block.” At any time of day, we’d set off. Sometimes just up the street and actually around the block, or other afternoons on hours-long rambles through the woods behind our neighborhood. We walked in sunny days, through sleet, through knee-deep snow, in the sweet spring rain. It’s a habit all three of his children have continued our whole lives, and his four grandchildren, too.

Sunny, here, in northern Vermont, too, a day of such optimism that the blue sky choruses the inevitable promise of spring. And for my father, one of our favorite poems from the unmatchable Hayden Carruth.

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.