Snow? Snow!

We've got ourselves another cold front set to tighten our nipples and scrotums. There will be no relaxing of involuntary responses to temperature, I tell you. Though D and I cooked a lovely, spicy vegetable stew that warms us. Ah. . .

Right. So, there's still a bit of snow on the ground, and the powers that be suggest that we might get another bit o' dusting. I've been thinking about that stuff, and how we respond to it. And I've thought my thoughts into a poem form. It seems nice. But it won't let my nipples alone.

The Neighborly Business of Shoveling Snow

Wind scrubs his face, his shovel’s handle
is not wood, doesn’t feel like wood in his hands.
Gloves feel the world.

Birds dart from pine to ash, shake balance loose.
He woodburns ash and oak, not pine,
in the velvet barrel of his stove.

Snow continues to fall like snow.
Farther south, where sandhill cranes winter,
ice builds up in thin, bright layers.

Traces of summer garden are lost.
Paths appear, fill in, reappear with tracks
of red squirrels, sparrows, the neighbor’s pumpkin cat.

It’s a big storm. Anyone could see his breath
and imagine that the air hurts his lungs.
Windblown ice pebbles sting like lava sparks.

If he were younger, he’d test the snow for packing.
Older, and he might collapse soon, chest.
A bison would stand into the blow. He scoops again.

Comments

[Crafty Green Poet]

I enjoyed this poem, all that snow and the pumpkin cat!