Winter Elegy

by John McKernan

Snow crawled across Omaha like lice
The snow did not say a single syllable
The snow was black until dawn
The snow might have been a closet stuffed with
       paper bags full of old clothing
The snow lay in the cracks in the sidewalk
       Bird feathers
The snow was decorous & appropriate
The snow lolled across the neighbors' lawns
       in vast lace doilies
The snow was not a cloud or a mist or
       a glass of water or an ice cube
If the snow belonged here We didn't
In her crib in Providence my daughter
       heard a rattle & cooed
The snow in Nebraska never learned Braille
The snow grew eyes on the window It could
       see far into the future
The snow resembled apple blossoms on
       the black limbs of the maple
The snow floated through the chain link fence
The snow decorated the sixteen sides
       of the stop sign
When a car would slide to a stop the snow
       turned the color of blood
If the snow is a painter it is the
       inside of a tube of frozen paint
It only looks like a telephone wire
The snow does not know how to write Every
       thing is nine vowels & two consonants
Snow has the color of teeth of jawbones
       of ribs
"Shit" said the paperboy as he opened
       the door
In the distance in Iowa the silos
       begin to wear white beanies
Tiny white clouds rise from the exhaust pipes
       of a row of gleaming parked cars
Each corn stalk in the fields casts a shadow
A billion sundials stretch towards Colorado
On a sheet of white paper the sounds S
       & N & OWE might mean a wound
The girl in Huntington West Virginia
       wrote a letter to me in pink ink on
       blue paper

"You are evil I despise you I can never forgive you for not telling me
about Tom’s funeral     I would have walked barefoot to Nebraska in a
snow storm to say goodbye to him one last time"

John McKernan,who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives, mostly, in West Virginia, where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field, and many other magazines.