Snow

by Lael Ewy

Snow is our punishment
for the amnesia of summer.
The mind is saddled
with memory—all the better
for our reverences to ride, but burdened,
still, with the baggage of having been,
seeming safe beneath the pines, a swollen,
slumped soldier, frozen to his mount:
the ark of Adam, the idiocy
of a child. To imagine is to project
one’s warm body back
into a bank of snow and expect
warming universal fact.

We live in a snow-cave
and dream its walls,
smoothed by our breathing, closed
against the Elements, its silence
the deafness of the gods.

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