‘Retreating Snow’ and Other Poetry by Reid McGrath

Retreating Snow

Like an old man dragging his long white hair
out of the lawn, back toward the forest’s shade,
the snow retreats, cornered, and well-aware
of time that’s up and warmth it can’t evade…

Young blonde Apollo bays this crumbling foe
and inch by inch reclaims the tawny grass;
and while there is a time for fresh-white snow,
one does exclaim: “At last! At last! At last!”

His Palomino team touch on the ground
and pull their pony-cart over the fields
spreading their burlap-color all around;
tan Phoebus*, with his long-bow that he wields,
steals back the landscape, conquers the old snow,
which soon enough will have nowhere to go.

*another name for Apollo, the Greek sun god.

A Vision

I huddled up against a frozen tree.
A piebald deer within the dark’ning wood,
in leaves of laurel black with shading, stood
broadside and still with clear regality.

With weird-white pelt obscured against the snow,
it lifted up its crown of thorny horn
and looked at me without the blackest scorn
I did deserve; for I was ’bout to blow

a hole into its flank before I’d seen
that it was not just snow that made it white.
Like a vision I saw what could have been;

what Thomas saw when that side wound had bloomed.
“No one can touch me. It wouldn’t be right,”
it said, I think, or I at least assumed.

Reid McGrath is a poet living in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Featured Image: “Off the Greenland Coast under the Midnight Sun” by William J. Bradford (1823-1892).