• From On the Edge
  • Lights I have Seen Before
  • For Fran
  • My Poets
  • L'Homme et la Bete
  • On the Edge
  • The Horse
• From Not This Pig
  • A New Day
  • Blasting from Heaven
  • To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop
  • The Cemetery at Academy, California
  • Silent in America
  • The Midget
  • Heaven
  • Waking an Angel
  • Animals are Passing from our Lives
  • Baby Villon
• From Red Dust
  • Clouds
  • Noon
  • Holding On
  • Fist
  • How Much Can it Hurt
  • The Helmet
  • Red Dust
  • How Much Earth
  • A Sleepless Night
  • Told
• From Pili's Wall
  • Pili's Wall I-X
• From They Feed They Lion
  • Renaming the Kings
  • To a Fish Head Found on the Beach near Málaga
  • Salami
  • Coming Home
  • Detroit Grease Shop Poem
  • Saturday Sweeping
  • Angel Butcher
  • They Feed They Lion
  • The Children's Crusade
  • Later Still
  • To P.L.;1916-1937
  • Breath
• From 1933
  • Zaydee
  • Grandmother in Heaven
  • Late Moon
  • At the Fillmore
  • The Poem Circling HamTramck, Michigan All Night in Search of You
  • Letters for the Dead
  • Goodbye
  • Uncle
  • 1933
  • Hold Me
• From The Names of the Lost
  • On the Birth of Good & Evil during the Long Winter of '28
  • No One Remembers
  • Belle Island, 1949
  • New Season
  • On the Corner
  • Gift for a Believer
  • Wednesday
  • My Son and I
  • A Late Answer
  • On the Murder of Lieutenant José del Castillo by the Falangist Bravo Martinez, July 22, 1936
  • Ask the Roses
  • And the Trains Go On
  • To My God in His Sickness
• From Ashes
  • The Miracle
  • Starlight
  • Nitrate
  • Making It New
  • On a Drawing by Flavio
  • Ashes
  • Lost and Found
• From 7 Years from Somewhere
  • I Could Believe
  • Planting
  • Francisco, I'll Bring You Red Carnations
  • Milkweed
  • Hear Me
  • The Last Step
  • The Face
  • Let Me Begin Again
  • Snow
  • Words
  • You Can Have It
  • Let Me Be
  • 7 Years from Somewhere
• From One For the Rose
  • Having Been Asked "What is a Man?" I Answer
  • The Poem of Flight
  • I Was Born in Lucerne
  • Roofs
  • The Conductor of Nothing
  • The Fox
  • Genius
  • To Cipriano, in the Wind
  • Belief
  • Sources
  • Rain Downriver
  • The Suit
  • The Voice
  • On my Own
  • One for the Rose
• From Sweet Will
  • Salts and Oils
  • The White Iris
  • Look
  • Sweet Will
  • From A Poem With No Ending
  • An Ordinary Morning
  • Jewish Graveyards, Italy
• From A Walk with Tom Jefferson
  • Buying and Selling
  • Making Light of It
  • Winter Words
  • 28
  • These Streets
  • At Bessemer
  • Dog Poem
  • Theory of Prosody
  • A Walk with Tom Jefferson

Snow

Today the snow is drifting
on Belle Isle, and the ducks
are searching for some opening
to the filthy waters of their river.
On Grand River Avenue, which is not
in Venice but in Detroit, Michigan,
the traffic has slowed to a standstill
and yet a sober man has hit a parked car
and swears to the police he was
not guilty. The bright squads of children
on their way to school howl
at the foolishness of the world
they will try not to inherit.
Seen from inside a window,
even a filthy one like those
at Automotive Supply Company, the snow
which has been falling for hours
is more beautiful than even the spring
grass which once unfurled here
before the invention of steel and fire,
for spring grass is what the earth sang
in answer to the new sun, to
melting snow, and the dark rain
of spring nights. But snow is nothing.
It has no melody or form, it
is as though the tears of all
the lost souls rose to heaven
and were finally heard and blessed
with substance and the power of flight
and given their choice chose then
to return to earth, to lay their
great pale cheek against the burning
cheek of earth and say, There, there, child.