White Shadows
At midday, white shadows blaze on the southern slopes
of ditches, narrow northward from boulders--the oldest snow
of the youngest blizzard now looking driven
by the south and not the northeast wind,
brazenly asserting its high-gloss glaciers
behind any ridgeline, declaring a day-long ice age
not only along the forest's edge, but equally
paralleling the slightest rises in mid-field--
surviving with an infantry veteran's sense
of how the slightest alternation of terrain
can afford protection. The patches lie in wait,
holding their white flags, waiting to surrender,
for me to realize, belatedly, there must be such cold spots
year round--even in the hottest
of sunstruck midsummer, some slightest moon-cusp of lesser
temperature biding its time at the back edge
of everything--and to realize--still forty-nine--
how much of me now is part of that stubborn, silently
lingering confraternity: cold
to my son chasing bands with misspelled names, old and cold
to his war stories of feats in mosh pits,
to his having written two rock songs in physics.
``The old snowflake analogy,'' as Joe Novak, schizophrenic genius
mentor, called it (could it be a generation ago?) ((a generation
was 19 years, not that long ago--now it's 30--the very
generations are getting older)): when things or thoughts
grow colder, they take on form. To which, Joe,
I would add--now older than you were then--this
about snow: the way it holds a shape, again
like the old infantrymen, with a stiffened dignity
where once they were feverous and sore, seems
to salute the greatness of the growing heat
that will set it at ease,
finally free it.
This snow, this last snow, or at least everyone wants it so,
already is almost melted, melding to green as it goes.
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