A Snowy Day
No one came to work today; even my
daughter gone. I had the house to myself.
The snow fell softly, covering the earth
with its shining cloak of barely living
light. How beautiful and plentiful it
fell, on my many-windowed house. All
day long it fell. Before I woke, falling.
After darkness descended, falling.
At noon I went out to shovel what I
could, plucking the instrument from the
shingle where it stood, and working long
hours until exhaustion made me pause.
Then, leaning a weary chin against the
shovel handle’s end, I saw how strange
the world looked in that afternoon light.
It might be a quarter century, I thought,
before I see such things again, death
having to intervene. The sky was gray,
and grayer still the clouds, pulled like a
shroud across. Across the road, a forest of
abandoned trees obeyed unseen harmonies,
bending stiffly this way and that (not all
these dancers uniform), in complex
harmonies and symphonies stiff of nature’s
cold command. The trees were lovely, dark,
and deep, and I longed to go into them,
to stand among them, to be as one with them—
tall like them, stiff like them, my face buried
in their midst—but fortune prevented me,
a row of tangled wires making a
disastrous fence I dared not cross. The
driveway finished, squared off and cleared,
I put the instrument of my salvation back,
kicked my boots against the gray stoop,
and returned, mindless the while, to the
kitchen, warm and gradually darkening.
Later, having cleared my table of plate
and spoon, I lingered late to watch the night
drop down, for how quickly it sometimes
drops, as a curtain drops, signifying ends.
Long I stood to watch that spectacle,
but nothing in that darkness visible
proving ultimately discernible, and
it eventually becoming late, and my
eyes also continuously darkening,
I went at last to bed, still unable to see
the moon—how it rose or, whether full.
• • •
Poet in New York, January 1, 1994
You pass the thousand shops, the Korean
delis with their bosoms of fruit thrust out.
After the movie you will run a small
but significant errand. Let your imagination
drop like a baited line, or send it flying
up, to soar and dive on the wind; above
the ugly glitter and the clutter of the gutter;
above whoever asks, with a whimper,
for your quarter; not stopping for her or
anyone else. Your habit, to be abstract.
To leave the small stuff behind.
• • •
Lisa Low’s poetry, reviews, interviews, and academic essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, Cross Currents, The Boston Herald, Phoebe, The Portland Press Herald, Potomac Review, and Aphros Literary Magazine, among others. She is one of the editors of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. She received her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Colby College in Waterville, Maine; and Pace University in New York City. In addition to her work as an educator, Low was briefly a film and theatre critic for Christian Science Monitor.