KATE LYNN HIBBARD
KATE LYNN HIBBARD
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
O HOLY SNOW
the way it shadows the
trees, even in the heat
of summer
some mornings
I look outside and see
February’s ermine
world
that it kills, demands
respect, numbs, warms, blinds, burns
exertion exposure
avalanche
slang for too
much flattery
hollow
column stellar dendrite
fern crystal latticework
translucent hexagon
reflecting falling light
each has its own soul the
surface soft yet frozen
difficult to predict
difficult to measure
your six-fold symmetry
prism halo
silence
of snow gunmetal sky
before it comes tinny
and clean pleasure coming
in from it
smell of wet
wool pools melting beneath
caked boots
fluffy champagne
powder corduroy wet
hellish picturesque
the sound of shovels scraping
morning clean
depth hoar firn
the accumulation
graupel rime
accretion
ablation
the sheer wet
decoration
blizzard
squall you suspend all time
the silence the silence
Kate Lynn Hibbard won the 2004 Gerald Cable Book Award, and her poetry collection Sleeping Upside Down was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2006. She teaches writing and women's studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.
How full of creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire them more if real stars fell and lodged in my coat.
--Henry David Thoreau, 1856