We’re all down here
Banging on the cosmic pipes
For someone to please
Turn up the heat
But there’s nobody home
Just confetti drifting down
Must be some hell of a parade
Friday, February
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Tag Archives: snow
Blizzard, by William Carlos Williams
One of the imagists, to whom we owe much of modern poetry.
Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.
Snow, again
Unbidden, it comes all the same
Without malice, unaware and uninterested
In our dreams or desires
Without even innocence
Its promise of sweet seclusion
Sequestered beneath the pale sameness
Dissolving in the salty mired streets
White and gray in a death spiral
A love embrace unlike any
Seen since the last snowfall
What may be, what could be
Belong to the feckless air
Oh, I can dream, all right
But only until recalled
By bickering gulls
Geese barking orders,
Or the shrill outrage of the
Woodpecker’s call
A field mouse trips nervously
Across an ice dam
Vultures patrol the freeway
Food from top to bottom
Interested only in replication
The slaughter of millions
But a byproduct of procreation
So long as enough survive to breed
Or not, and even then,
Some beast waits anxiously in the wings
For just enough change
Just enough opportunity
And still, falls the snow.
A winter quartet
I
Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush
II
Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.
III
Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.
IV
A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.
Thunder snow
The clouds thickened and cracked the planks of heaven
Heaved overboard their burden
And crushed the green and brown spring in pale dunes
Robins puffed to pigeon size
Buds disappeared beneath white-laced wings
Of earth-shackled trees
No one about but Cossack girls
With speckled jeans and high boots
Pulled along on bright orange leashes
Their dogs resolute and patient
Sniffing remnants of bygone colleagues
And sprinkling messages in the snow
Long ago such snow shrouded mysteries
What was it I imagined?
All of life and death I suppose
All of longing all of waiting
All smothered ambivalence
All new and green erupting from stagnation
exiles child 