"Unforgetting" isn't a word you'd expect to find in a dictionary, which suits a poem about skills slipping away and the clumsy business of getting them back. A year into the pandemic, the speaker opens with a string of questions: can I still kiss, still hug? Is it "a muscle-memory thing, like riding a bicycle"? That comparison is a cliché, and the poem treats it as one, testing it instead of trusting it. The central idea is that long isolation makes even the body's oldest knowledge feel doubtful, and that recovery, if it comes, will arrive slowly, through small physical acts rather than any grand return.
The humour is dark. "I've forgotten whole languages, one lonely drink at a time" is a joke with a bruise in it: the exaggeration is funny, the solitary drinking is not. The poem leaves open whether the languages are literal or the unspoken ones of a crowded room, though the next sentence, about a "room full of strangers," nudges toward the second reading. The last question turns on one verb: "Will we ever *pretend* that's normal again?" Normality becomes something we perform, and the "we" pulls the reader into the speaker's uncertainty.
The shape helps. Two prose paragraphs each end in a short, unrhymed three-line verse, a pairing that recalls the Japanese haibun. Prose is where the speaker worries and surveys; the verses are where something is simply seen. They don't follow a strict 5-7-5 count. "last year's pod / still holding on / to next year's milkweed" runs three, four and five syllables. The milkweed image is the poem's quiet hinge. A seed pod is both an ending and a container, so last year's husk carries a plant that hasn't grown yet, and two years sit inside one object. "Still holding on" could describe the pod, or anyone who got through the winter.
The second paragraph widens into a landscape drawn in flat, factual sentences, several of them fragments: "To the east, the giant gray steps of the limestone quarry. To the north, the paper plant with its white flag of vapor." Human industry is everywhere and keeps moving, with the railroad "following the river" and the interstate "following the ridge." The repeated verb puts everything on a track, while the speaker stands still at the end of the mountain. The "white flag of vapor" is a telling detail, since a white flag means surrender, and the mood is weary enough to take the hint. Then comes the personification: snow "has taken its blank eraser and retreated to higher ground." The eraser quietly echoes the title, with forgetting as weather. But the ground it leaves is bare and offers "nothing new in its place. Not yet." Those last two words form the shortest sentence in the poem and hold all its hope. They are a postponement, not a refusal.
The closing verse answers the opening questions without mentioning them. A "noon whistle" cuts through the scene, the speaker pauses, and then eats "a handful / of old snow." Nothing could be less abstract. The snow is cold, leftover, a relative of last year's pod, and eating it is done with hands and mouth. If the body can still do that, perhaps it can still hug. The line break after "handful" makes us wait a beat to learn what is being held, a small pause that matches the one in the walk.
The poem never promises that ordinary life is coming back. It offers the more believable comfort of noticing: the senses still work, seeds are waiting, and "not yet" is not "never." That restraint is why it still rings true. It catches a mood many people recognised during the pandemic without leaning on big statements, and it lets a handful of snow carry the weight.