Sunday, February 25, 2018

Late Mid-Winter Snow

Augustus Saint-Gaudens


Late Mid-Winter,
Snow


Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.

                                                     Jane Hirshfield
                                                     Amor Fati


The way waiting in the dark
is when we’re expecting
snow but we don’t know it

has begun falling yet and how
because now it is falling
and the sun will come up without us

seeing it isn't it always up
somewhere—hasn't it even risen
by now and we know it has

it was there yesterday
and they say it will
be there tomorrow

but today today the snow
is like ash falling straight down
the chimney.  Remember

when the man came to clean
the bats out and the crystalized
creosote, like sand on that frozen

shoreline just by the run-off
creek-ditch we’d sit by when you
stepped on it remember

how it flaked and fell
into the water and it was all
fast and cold and broke open 

more on those thin shelfs
of ice suspended above the stones
(and if I’m lucky in this)

the old coal from the run-
aground barges all those
years ago-- and I love holding

it in my hand because I know
I’ll never burn it and never
turn it into ash

into seared heat that clings
to brick and builds up as it cools
and melts some and goes

rigid for a creature like
a bat to get what? stuck?
raise a pup?  because it’s

a somewhat dormant chimney,
but still…it’s late mid-winter and the casual
brush of a foot or a broom seems

destructive, to sweep it all clean
or if not clean at least
down into the bottom of some

bottom to settle it all the way dust
is settled briefly before the wind
on ice and snow

to pause on the shallows
while sun on our side
of the earth right now

makes her way turns
and seems (though we know
otherwise) to rise hold still


and fall

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