Snowfall in G Minor

1950 –

Overnight, it’s pow! The held note
keeps falling. And only seems
slow. Because it’s just 
frozen rain, what’s the big deal? the checker
in Stop and Shop told me.
                                           Save warmth
like stamps. The fade of their color
in the 1920s.  Airmail.  The pilot with his 
skin-tight goggle helmet on his 
miniature head could be 
snow-blind.
                           All heads are small. Mine’s
lost as a thimble 
in this weather. Where 
a finger should be and be 
sewing, every thought 
I ever thunk. 
                               Just this word
thunk. Never used. 
It lands, noisy
metal in a bucket. That’s
the last of it.  No echo
for miles of this
                              snowfall—as in 
grace, fallen from,
as in a great height, released
from its promise.

The Carnivorous Plants

in exile, ganged up in this greenhouse of living ache
and want, shabby glassed-in room with a door propped open
by a dustpan under a scribbled please, keep locked,
underlined, underlined. Who wrote that, what guardian

of the wordless deep to abet these most patient other
bullies on their bright faded stalks breathing in
my carbon, giving back oxygen, not a gift, only something
to remind: the invisible exchange—love that first.

Marianne Boruch

2018

There Ought to Be a Law Against Henry

given his showing up to teach at the U 
disheveled, jittery cigarette and cigarette and probably 
the drink, losing the very way there 
over river, river of all song, all American story 
which starts way north of St. Paul quiet or undone 
wandering south, not 
enraged mostly, something stranger. 
That’s one epic shard of John Berryman anyway.

Notorious.

Marianne Boruch

2018

The First Layer of City

Concerning the lost and so
much of it, the Professor of Antiquities
is on TV again—

Think about that.

I love the word oxymoron like I love the word
hope loving him back such a long way.

The ancients then, via digital pulse. But never
to know except with shovel, brush,
magnifying glass. He dreams out the rest.

The rest is resting in dust. The rest too will

come out of deep down
petrified wood or gold or bronze
fierce, the spear end of it.

Marianne Boruch

2016

Poems

Snowfall in G Minor

More by this poet

The Carnivorous Plants

There Ought to Be a Law Against Henry

The First Layer of City

Poems

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Snowfall in G Minor

More by this poet

The Carnivorous Plants

There Ought to Be a Law Against Henry

The First Layer of City

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