Muddy Bank

Next week on the first day of winter, keep warm with a hot issue of The 2River View, with new poems by Hannah Bessinger, Randolph Bridgeman, Robert Clinton, Lenny DellaRocca, Clark Holtzman, Michael Meyerhofer, Karen June Olson, Corey Smith, Ellen Stone, Scott H. Urban, and Rachel Weber. To spark the stove, here’s a poem from the issue.

Ellen Stone

Snow: the letting go

Today the snow is wandering,
over the backyard gate, fleeting.
Forgetting intention, losing purpose.
Aimless as school out in June.

This is the secret of adolescence.
Hodgepodge, it fills space like snow.
When you leave it, you forget.
But, here and now, it’s called drifting,

a blizzard of momentary. A “What are you doing
right now?” Each thought gathering,
joining onto the next. How snow caves form.
Aren’t they the best insulation?

The igloo of my daughter’s mind. What room
I can find her in, the place she calls
Hers/not/mine. I always thought the bricks
were made of mud, or clay. Not river current,

able to freeze over, but always flowing underneath.
O, no wonder I am always looking
out windows measuring snow. Wanting the covering
but, not remembering. How temporary, how replete.

Ellen Stone teaches at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poems have appeared recently in Dunes Review, Gravel Mag, Passages North, and elsewhere. The Solid Living World won the 2013 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest.