by Bill Coyle

The cargo of cold white
in the red pickup that waits
beside me at the light
explained (if not away, quite)
by the truck’s New Hampshire plates.

*

Beautiful, but how,
after a lifetime of snow
did I still not know
a snowflake casts a shadow?
Maybe I did know. I know now.

*

Behind the snow lies
an invisible heaven:
migratory cries
tell us so, suggest even
our kind might find paradise.

*

Michelangelo
saw the statue in the stone.
I feel like I alone
can discern through all this snow
the car parked here not a day ago.

*

Lion at our back door,
who set you here, and what for?
Our upstairs neighbor,
I imagine? For good Feng Shui?
I like your white fez today.

*

Atop each flattened
picket-tip sits a fattened
white bird the weather
overnight put together
feather by crystal feather.

*

The treasury of snow,
one of them, in any case,
is out past Pluto,
whence comets come, whence they go,
on the margins of deep space.