Head cold
The house is pinned
under heavy snow.
My head fills with mucus.
Icy limbs strain
to reach the ground,
alternately melting and freezing.
I drip in the noon-time glare.
Let me be replenished
in nightly increments.
Poems on the topic: snow
Poems on the topic “snow” on Poets.by.
Deep snow
In all this blankness,
a squirrel finds the precise spot
it buried a nut.
Breaking trail with snowshoes,
I choose to believe
I’m half-floating, not half-sinking.
Clumps of snow sail off the trees,
making a random scatter
of oblong prints.
Rabbit
A rabbit has squeezed
into a ring of fencing
to browse on dogwood sprouts
and can’t get out.
The snow crunches under
my boots as I loom up,
the small animal
beating against its cage
like a panicked heart.
Pastoral
The squirrel’s tracks end
in a smudge of blood on the snow,
one tuft of fur
and the long furrow
its dangling tail drew
beside the fox’s footprints.
Alone in the field,
a bulldozer lowers its blade
to a white and heavy harvest.
Snowfall
The slow and steady
accumulation of snow
making everything strange
reminds me of my father
reading aloud to the family
from a book in his lap,
the whisper of pages turning,
each of us building a picture
all our own.
Snow plow
Our neighbor plows
down-hollow and back,
his wife riding shotgun.
The old plow truck hasn’t left
the mountain in years,
bound to its one road.
In each yard,
it raises white ramparts
from the fallen enemy.
Walking the line
High winds. I press an ear
to the trunk of a ridge-top oak
and hear nothing but wind.
My footprints in the snow
are more than erased;
they’re raised up, scattered like ashes.
The woodpecker must hear any sound
an oak can make.
It taps out a response.
Kenosis
Mid-January, & the bear
who hasn’t had
a meal in two
months, & won’t for
another three, half-
wakes to chew
sticks into soft
chips—bedding
for the cubs who
will soon be born
& squall
& nurse.
She may leave the den
to eat snow or merely
dream of it.
Her heart beats
White Christmas
Nothing is more innocent than snow.
It says: I am not of your world.
We wonder: What child is this,
what wool, what milk?
Then we look back & see our footprints
multiplying behind us.
Maybe this is nothing but a white flag.
But whose turn is it to surrender?
New snow falls & fills the footprints in.
We feel we are being measured for immaculate shoes.
Groundhog Day
It’s not his own shadow he looks for
but the shadows of hawks.
He has stirred from hibernation
not to forecast but to inspect
others’ burrows—to scout for mates.
His lust is still containable,
a faint mutter like an underground stream
or a sleepwalker’s obstreperous
small intestine. He serves it
more in faith than in urgency,
a reluctant prophet answering a call,
for he’s exposed to the sky
in a way he isn’t used to:
there’s no grass, no cover,
the meadow has a new, white surface
& the sun too is strange—it gives
Snow Globe
Bits of white suspended in solution
swirled past the window after every upheaval.
I found a pencil with a blessing on the side
& decided to start a list
of everywhere I’d been.
I filled three notebooks just with the hiding places
in my parents’ house. At this rate, I realized,
the pencil would be gone
before I made it halfway to the street.
Under my hat my hair continued to grow.
The pilot light burned like an insomniac
in the back of the oven.
Cold Front
With the cold front
came news of your death—
a failed bypass—
and a skim of snow
that vanishes at the sun’s touch.
Soon, only shadows are white,
like the letters
I keep trying to form
as my pen runs out of ink.
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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