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A late April snow clouds the view of fenceline
and the trees are an elegant velcro black against the
hills.
The fat flakes are easy, feeling out spots to drop,
a buxom heap already lying down.
The fish are biting on most anything that moves.
They hurry in fear of ice.
Today, in mid-afternoon, housewives will gather around
kitchen tables
in electric warmth and speak in whispers of men, and
women, and girth
while bits of snow spit outside their insulated windows.
The cows refuse to whet their calves desire.
Their bellies warm the earth.
They say if you can spell Mississippi with your pee in
the snow,
then you will be rich one day, or famous.
The cardinals that fight for a mate look
like splashes of blood in the street.
Once, a man built a house that he actually lost
forever in a late
Spring snow because he had not moved into it and so
forgot its whereabouts,
such was the mood of his mind.
The garden daffodils that bloomed on schedule
lie dying under the smashing snow.
When the first sunlight arrives, tomorrow or a week
from tomorrow,
I will go into the field with a virgin bucket and fairly
fill it with
cold snow and I'll set it on my stove until it melts
and then I'll pour it into trays and freeze it in my
icebox.
And when friends come by in the mid-August heat,
I'll serve them those cubes in their glasses
and that night they will dream
blue cold and milk white wintry thoughts.
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