It comes up out of the ocean
warm days. It reaches
for inland meadows and sighs
across grass in its cape of rain.

People come to their doors.
They look where the trees turn
gray, where hills have stepped back
of each other. Whatever it was,

It passed carefully, touching
farms, leaning over ponds,
bending down the wheat.
People stand long at their doors.

“You were good this time, August
Old Friend. So long. So long.”

William Stafford, The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review