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.