by Grant Clauser

Tonight’s snow falls
like moth wings
spiraling after they burn
against a hot lantern,
and it brings with it
the chronic endurance of winter,
how landscape covered
in fractaled ice seems
to step outside of time.
I watch from my kitchen at 3am,
while my neighbor’s light
also winks on across the yard
and I wonder what
old or new anxieties
keep him up too.
From the bent pines
between our houses,
lit only from windowglow,
two deer stumble
through drifts and disappear.
And now the snow comes
faster, the world getting older
and desolated by cold,
everything getting heavier
with the work of bearing it up.

Grant Clauser is the author of five books, most recently Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, and others. He works as an editor in Pennsylvania and teaches at Rosemont College.