Prose Poems

                    I

It’s been snowing heavily and streets with cars
and other things are completely covered with
snow. Funny, snow always (especially at two in
the morning) gives a sense of permanence,
unchangingness. It arrests time and things
stay. Like a flood it covers all and swamps
all but unlike a flood it moves nothing and is
in itself unmoving. It reminds me of a
Japanese sand garden with patterns raked into
the sand. It stays for as long as you leave
it, then you flatten it and rake up a new
pattern. Cars come and make furrows in the
snow, these stay until other cars make other
furrows.

                    II

For every mask that we take off there is always
one more left on—an endless recession of
masks, of depths of withdrawal. As long as
there is life, there is the ability to recede
further. The self is infinitely reductive and
is never reduced to nothing. Alternatively,
one can reach out and touch infinitely into the
other person, the other thing, the outside, and
having always to reach yet further.

Copyright © 2004 Louise Ho All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission