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Posts Tagged ‘snow’


 
 
Perhaps I wish for something dangerous—
a rush, a breakneck ride, a snow-drunk risk.
Instead, my daughter and I slide the toboggan
down the drive with a languid, slow-motion
sluggishness. And we laugh as we urge
the wooden sled forward, creeping
down the hill. After a few laps, the run
is fast enough we can build a small jump
at the bottom, but it’s more of a bump
than a launch. What is it in the heart
that loves a surge, a swell of excitement,
a dance with danger? Why is it fun
to be out of control when the stakes are low?
 
Oh, my girl and I know, we know what it’s like
when the stakes are high. No wonder
we laugh as we slide at the pace of a stroll.
We know what it’s like to be out of control.
We know. I hold her by the waist as we barely move.
And part of me longs for speed. And part of me
is grateful to move in a way that lets me hold her
a little bit, even just a few seconds, longer.

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That Time


It was like driving through a winter storm
   for years, day after week after month
     after night after morning of white-knuckled,
   stiff-shouldered worry. No tracks to follow,
no sign of a centerline, no rails on the edge,
   and where are the snowplows, and what
     good is a map when you can’t read the signs?
       There were whole months of white out, driving snow-blind
    and slow, whole seasons of running the wipers on high
   in an attempt to see just one inch further.
       It was icy roads, skidding with the baby in back.
         It was wishing I could ask someone else
       to take the wheel. It was frozen-slick and slippery
     with no studded snows. It was sliding with no brakes.
   It was what I woke to everyday
and what I dreamed at night.
   If there was beauty, I was too afraid to see it.
I wish I could tell you I was brave.
   It was slow to change,
     like a spring that arrives only to leave again.
       One day the drifts were gone and the roads
         were dry and the sky was wide blue and clear.
           But it wasn’t like snow, was it?
         Some things don’t just melt away.
       Some storms transform the landscape forever.
     Some storms transform the driver.

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One Unmappable

 
in the cemetery
new snow—
why does it bring me joy
to see it,
this thin foot path to you

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Just when I believed
autumn would last forever
it didn’t.
Not that I really thought
the gold leaves would stay.
Not that I really believed
the warm days were endless—
but part of me wanted them to be.

And so this cold morning,
driving on ice
when I feel the slip of the wheels
as they lose traction,
the heart resonates
with the skid.

Oh, this lesson
in losing control.
Oh, this remembering
how quickly it all slides by—
the light, the warmth,
the deepening gold,
even this fleeting understanding
of how quickly
it all slides by.

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Clean Slate

It’s almost always sunny just before
it snows—just before the sky turns grey
then meets the earth in giant swaths
of blue turned clouds turned snow turned drift,
and haven’t you sometimes wanted
to do that, too—to shift in an instant
from warm to cool, from blue to gray,
to know yourself as the opposite
of what you are, just as a day does,
an entirely new syntax unspooling
in swirling verbs and whirling predicates
so complex you forget who the subject is—
haven’t you wanted to flurry, to blizzard,
to white out until there were no tracks
like sentences left for you to follow?

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One in the Woods




crooked staves
aspen shadows on snow—
our attention the song

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Concurrent

On a morning

when the snow

falls and drapes

everything in shine,

it is not that I don’t

feel the wounds—

raw and throbbing—

it’s just that it’s

so beautiful,

this tender world,

that I want

to praise it

forever.

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Their hats are cockamamie.

One has lost its carrot nose.

Stone buttons and eyes

have long since succumbed

to gravity. But there is

something yet dignified

about the snow people in the yard,

their knobby stick arms raised

as if, in their declining state,

there’s still so much to praise.

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Clear Instruction

Tonight my daughter

closes her fist

around the first snow

squeezes to make it

into a small cold ball

the shape of her hand,

and then offers it to me.

It tastes like sky,

like electric charge,

like winter, like childhood,

like curiosity.

And once again

I’m a girl who walks

to the neighbor’s yard

for a drink at the well—

I pump the heavy lever

and it draws clean, clear water

from the ground.

There’s a red metal ladle

hanging from a nail

on a nearby tree,

and the water tastes of moss

and rust and freedom.

There is a thirst

that’s been bequeathed us—

a thirst for what is

untreated and pure,

a thirst I somehow

manage to forget.

If it could speak,

the thirst might say,

Remember, remember,

remember.

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Second Chance

 

 

Next time the boy

throws the snow

at my face,

 

please let me see

an invitation

to play,

 

though it’s cold,

surprising,

his eyes bright requests.

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