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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Snowball

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.

Published inIndex of all Poems