Good Loving Woman
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“Snow” by George Bilgere
March 19, 2013
Snow
A heavy snow, and men my age
all over the city
are having heart attacks in their driveways,
dropping their nice new shovels
with the ergonomic handles
that finally did them no good.
Gray-headed men who meant no harm,
who abided by the rules and worked hard
for modest rewards, are slipping
softly from their mortgages,
falling out of their marriages.
How gracefully they swoon—
that lovely, old-fashioned word—
from dinner parties, grandkids,
vacations in Florida.
They should have known better
than to shovel snow at their age.
If only they’d heeded
the sensible advice of their wives
and hired a snow-removal service.
But there’s more to life
than merely being sensible. Sometimes
a man must take up his shovel
and head out alone into the snow.
“Snow” by George Bilgere
for the gentlewomen who salt the steps and feed the flames
Salt Truck by Eleni Mandell (2007 Zedtone Inc.)
March 7, 2013
Winter Syntax by Billy Collins
February 5, 2013
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.
But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.
Good Loving Woman 