Snow

(I wrote this bunch of words for a "Backstage Graffiti" column in Meridian Magazine in 2002. Right now it's snowing outside, this 5 November 2008. Please pardon the didactics in the prose context.)

When I awoke on this spring morning, snow was gently falling in wide feathery cookies, light as air. Gazillions of them. As they fell down through the baby leaves on the aspens, neither disturbed the other—they were that light. This might be some of the last snow of the season. When it falls unexpectedly, out of time somehow, it sort of stops your head in its tired little circuit of worries and makes you gaze out the window and think about things. Maybe it reminds us how our lives can change as completely as snow changes the world. I wrote this poem nine years ago on the occasion of that season's first snow.

The first snow of the year
is falling, wide flakes swirling
and slanting through stuttering sunshine.
A little catches on the grass.

I think of deep snowfall
on some other winter, and you.

The sun is back.
The street shines black
and grass is green.
Still, snowflakes wander
like moths.
     

It's a gift, really, snow. It just, for no apparent practical reason, looks beautiful as it falls. Then it's beautiful as it lies there. Then, when we need water, that's what snow becomes, having been stored and delivered in ways we could never have thought of, let alone executed. Beautiful ways.