How Deep the Snow by Abigail Cloud
Associate poetry editor Heath Joseph Wooten on today’s bonus poem: Abigail Cloud’s surname captures the brilliance of her poetry. In “How Deep the Snow,” we are ushered into a soft, ephemeral moment. Despite how fleeting this scene is, it still carries a lush roundness that cradles us in from the cold and into a delicately rendered inside. The final lines, despite their gentleness, capture the mercurial debate of winter and the fireplace. Here is a whole narrative so briefly wrought—Cloud’s is an understated yet wholly compelling pen.
How Deep the Snow
It’s been so long we can’t remember how not to read
the organ of moss spread on the trunk. How to scatter
grassheads without drawing notes at our wrists. We listen
to the fog blowing over our bottles, wooly in its blue-breath,
a bold, dry stone. We follow heels to the woods, from scratch
to scratch in the mud. When snow reaches the chalked line
at the door we know, put our calculations from the last
hot hour to bed. The clock becomes the loudest object
in the house. Every creature that ticks falls to hush, looses
its cords to the air. Our feet shh at the roadside. At winter’s
long edge we go milk drunk. We close all of our eyes.
Abigail Cloud is a teaching professor at Bowling Green State University and editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review. Her first collection, Sylph, was published by Pleiades Press in 2014. She tweets @cloudabi.
