Pattiann Rogers - Snow Thinking
Someone must have thought of snow falling first,
before it happened. That's what I believe,
someone way before me, way before anyone
could write "snow" and then see it happen––
in the cracks between the mud bricks
of the patio, assuming the shapes
of seeded sedum and wineleaf, covering
the tops of overturned flowerpots,
so much whiter than the sky it comes from––
as we do sometimes.
I think it must have come (the being
of the motion of snow, I mean, furling out
of the black, this method of winding
and loosening, this manner of arriving)
first from deep inside someone, as we say,
out of some quiet, exuberant graciousness,
far beyond neutron or electron, was before
eyes or hands, far before any crudeness
like that.
It had to come from someone first,
before snow, this expression of snow,
the swift, easy, multi-faceted
passion possessed and witnessed
in descending snow. It must be so.
Otherwise, how could we, as ourselves,
recognize it now––the event of snow,
so clearly eloquent, so separate,
so much rarer than snow? It's there.
We know it––the succumbing to sky,
the melding, nothing too small
for the embracing, a singular gentleness.
And don't we know now, without seeing it,
without touching it, that outside the window
the snow is coming, accumulating over the walls
and hedges of the garden, covering
the terra cottta, filling all the filigree
and deficiencies of evening?
I believe that snow snowing is the form
of someone singing in the future
to a new and beloved child, a child who,
staring up at the indistinguishable
features of his mother's star–filled face
in the dark, knows, without touching
or seeing, the experience of snow, opening
his mouth to catch and eat every spark
of the story as it breaks and falls
so particularly upon him.
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