Elegy Beginning with a Text From My Brother
        how was the snow

As if the snow were a province I'd visited,
not a season come down upon me. As if
he'd never stood on the ridge and watched

the whole cloth of it blow in
over the lake,
blank and bridal.

Any mark I'd made on the earth, it annulled.
The dropped map, the poor footprints of children,
the felts I pulled from their boots hoping they'd dry

by morning. The snow was a field
I woke in. Here are the drifts
of my hands for proof, here is my heart gone

to windbreak. Brother, I am tired
of living bone-bound and uphill, of rolling through stops
to keep from getting stuck.

The snow was irrevocable, songless.

A relic. The ruins
of the wood.

I made my way home
by ditch and by deadfall,
all night laid awake in the storm

listening for the scrape
of the plow gone by, waiting
for the blade and my body

to change the snow's tense
from falling and falling
to fell.

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Copyright © 2020 Molly Spencer All rights reserved
from If the House
University of Wisconsin Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission