Poems Snow Falling By Marianne Boruch January 19, 2026

 in spite of love, the history of is or is not. Toward dread,

darkness though dawn could be my guess, snow morphing
to hardship, delight, mindless over and over. You forget

but I forgot so long ago. What does a single flake know
of its big/little fate? A very cold microscope might
seek out each never-the-same beauty. Snow’s

only choice: freeze. Or melt and flood. But falling means
right now back to prehistory where human isn’t
a thing yet, nor glass born of fire. The making’s done,

a canvas rolled up, flown across an ocean that shares its
infinity of vivid, all blues, reds, shadow, light, and wow—
look at that!—I’m stunned. Genius opens

its very few colors, the body bent to paint that way,
the arm no longer knows itself, nor the hand
a hand, nor the brain how to think.

As a child, I practiced small ways
to jump time and lose reason, grew blank enough
for snow-in-July! In that god-awful heat, I invented

iced-out streets, pointillism freezing mid-flight
albeit ninety degrees. In winter, in reverse, near zero,
I tried to try too, calling up the hot days—

crickets, bright leaves, the noise of what
intricate nonsense we get to be in summer.
Simply couldn’t see it among the cold high drifts.

Clearly I flunked Imagination.
Because it’s not prophecy or remembering.
My nowhere keeps coming, snow

the still center of it all. It falls, an erasure of mind.
I was walking just now. Another vast silence
is a field gone mute with it.

Published in the print edition of the January 26, 2026, issue.

Marianne Boruch has published several volumes of poetry and “The Figure Going Imaginary,” a collection of her writing and sketches.