One Winter
Where are the snows of years gone by?
And where’s the one who came this way
beneath a low and chalky sky
and walked with me that winter day
down hillside woods, past limestone walls,
then up a creek bed deep in snow
to see the frozen waterfalls?
The cataract’s arrested flow
shone like a pillared mound of glass,
all plunge and roar solidified
into a looming blue-green mass.
We stood in silence, side by side,
and winter held us, kept us bound
in consonance like ice and stone,
and laced together on the ground
the only tracks were ours alone.
But lives are fluid, mutable,
not fixed tableaux inside a sphere
where worlds are snowy beautiful
and nothing changes year to year.
I saw that winter melt and go
in icy currents down a stream
and all that bright beguiling snow
become a lost dissolving dream.
by Richard Meyer, appears in Orbital Paths.
Editor’s Note: This poems formal structure creates a lovely narrative direction in a poem that might otherwise seem too easy.
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