March First

No news today—the newspaper got buried
in the mountain of snow the plow left,
and I think I won't turn on the radio,
so that for one day at least I won't know
what's happening in the world, except right here:

a fresh eight inches on the shed roof,
the pine boughs almost sadly weighed down,
but the upslanting branches of the pin oaks
looking oddly more buoyant in their white highlights.
Today I'm more like the pines, I'm afraid,

drooping a little, unable to shake it off
the way a pine branch suddenly springs up
in a brief explosion of shed snow.
Over seventy inches this winter
the newspaper said the other day—

but I don't even want to think about the newspaper,
that "tissue of horrors," as Baudelaire called it,
though I like imagining it under the snow.
Maybe the kids will dig a fort and find it,
still folded in its orange plastic bag,

still dry, the pages cold when they open it
to read the comics in the aqua light
that filters through the snow fort's snowy walls.
Or maybe we won't find it until all
the snow has melted and we've long

gone on to other news. And there it will be
on the brown, flattened-down grass,
next to a plastic bone the dog had lost,
its sodden pages finally able to tell us
what happened today.

Copyright © 2007 Jeffrey Harrison All rights reserved
from Incomplete Knowledge
Four Way Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission