In order to view this poem with the line breaks the author intended, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in landscape orientation on your phone or tablet.

One Speaks of Particularity

Some days snow arrives with the brilliance
of a comet’s tail. What at first appears
from where we stand in the kitchen to be

a soft, frost-ridden fog of a temperate
winter’s morning—not unlike steam rising
from the backs of warm, well-fed horses—is

instead (we discover stepping out into it,
the way we’d confront galactic actuality
with a high-powered telescope) nothing less

than an icy, face-stinging dust of a cold,
indifferent universe.
Other days snow

eludes us in its indeterminance, its off-white
ambiguity. It arrives like the comics section
of a Sunday paper, blurry with the playful

humor of serious matters. We’re not quite sure
how we feel about it, how to describe it.
We can’t find words beyond Thump! or Yikes!

—
Phillip Sterling’s collections of poetry include Local Congregation: Poems Uncollected 1985-2015, Short on Days, And Then Snow, Mutual Shores, and four chapbook-length series of poems. A collection of essays and memoir, Lessons in Geography: The Education of a MIchigan Poet, was published by Cornerstone Press in August 2024.

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