This poem memorized itself into my body the first time I read it many years ago. Each time one of the lines drifts through my mind, like dark ice air through which we fall, all the sensations of snow settle over me. The particular, muffled quiet that only falling snow brings. The feeling of stillness and waiting. Numbness of cheeks and nose and fingers and toes after hours playing in it as a child. My dog, looking up and then around in wonder every year in the first snow.
These days my heart aches when the poem comes to me, in a please let there still be a future with winter in it way. Please let the earth go dormant, please let that dark ice air return, please let the planet keep breathing.
Snow, by Kevin Hart
Some days
the snow has taken me in
to know the time of snow, to live
inside a world so quiet
its music
is all a shimmering. Some evenings
when quite alone
I turn off every light
and watch the snow
enjoy the dark, moving lushly
through spiky air,
finding more time
in time
than when I stretch myself
and am
my father’s father. Oh yes,
there is
a sparkling choir, there surely is,
and dark ice air
through which we fall.
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Alison McGhee 