January 2025 (One Hundred Year Snowfall)
on Jim Dine’s lithograph, “7 Days of Creation: Snow”

White rooftops, tiles, shingles obliterated,

even buried my city became alive in snow:

novel, a rarity each century,

sporadic, usually sheathing

then melting upon contact

to disappointment’s consistency,

the slush between solid and liquid.

A pair of cardinals appeared on the white fence

when we made snow angels with expedient wings.

This time eleven inches on record,

fell in muffled breaths, like Goliath exhaling,

flakes mottled banana and ginger leaves,

drifts skirted camellias,

satsuma roots concealed by accumulation

different than frequent floods,

those and this reaching our knees,

ready to genuflect, bearing witness

to another genesis.