To look at thousands of poems.
To remember ships full of words.
To see the right way
and the wrong way,
how I try to sing in unison
with the world.
We all have our ways
of bearing witness.
The beam over a door
put there for the entrance
to your home.
The patchwork of a garden.
The collective of friends
and acquaintances
making the keepsake
of a life.
What can I make
of a snowball,
shoved together flake by flake,
with warm hands
and trembling cold?
Not counting the vast number
that melt and fall
through my fingers
to a ground of virgin whiteness,
leaving little graves and wishing wells.
I throw it in the sky,
and see at its apogee
the zenith I have touched,
before everything is gone
without a trace.
The life of a snowball.