The Moment of Snow
By Robert KingI remember snow each night that winter at that cabin
in the Crazy Mountains, each morning
a kind off forgetfulness, a soft scatter over the grit
of yesterday, wherever we’d worked or walked,
and I traced for years the way snow moves across Dakota,
smokes on tile highway, drifts in the ditch, but nothing
has stayed longer than one gray Colorado afternoon,
7th grade, 8th, heads down in our usual ranks and files,
when a little hiss of notice rippled across the room
and we looked up–one row at a time, it felt like–
at the sift of the fragile first flakes slanting down,
carrying our dizzy eyes and hearts along.
Regularly irregular, it shuffled inside us,
a relentless delicacy which might erase
everything we knew about our lives and teach us
something else. I don’t why that falling
still carries me down with it, or why,
helpless, I’ve loved anything in my life. I do know
the shapes of houses fading, the trees
dimming like twilight and how the multitude of snow
was an oblivion and nothing could save us,
nor mother, nor father, the town to be buried
by steady uncertainties, the world coming loose,
the first time something ceaseless had appeared
and we were beautiful enough to recognize it,
who would never see each other again,
who would see each other the next day,
who would no longer recognize ourselves.
