11.1.11


How Is It That the Snow

BY ROBERT HAIGHT
How is it that the snow   
amplifies the silence,   
slathers the black bark on limbs,   
heaps along the brush rows?   

Some deer have stood on their hind legs   
to pull the berries down.   
Now they are ghosts along the path,   
snow flecked with red wine stains.   

This silence in the timbers.   
A woodpecker on one of the trees   
taps out its story,   
stopping now and then in the lapse   
of one white moment into another.