Snow Falling Upward

By Ed Brickell

​                 

Surprised to learn you wanted to meet so soon
but there will be a time, you had said,
and on this invalid-sun morning, not long after
your wife’s passing, nearly four years after mine,
with what finally feels like winter in the sun’s weak shine,

we’re on our way to watch snow fall upward,
snow geese flocking to the refuge far from town,
annual mystery from the Arctic, plump white bodies

squawking thick on a vast green carpet of winter wheat,

sudden rising as one, snow falling upward into pewter sky,

as I consider each uncopied flake in a blizzard’s fall
peeling loose from frozen ground, reversing course
and returning to the clouds, how that would be –
time and season turning back to different weather.
I’m still finding my way, you said, as if questioning
the persistence of the weight of what had fallen,
this new confusion in your body. Later you glassed a bobcat,

an animal I always see just as it’s leaving, and I imagined
the one I saw many miles away and several years ago
as the same you spotted now, impossible vision of something

we both shared. Our boots crunched on the old rail bed,
talk wandered into silence past fields birdsong had abandoned,

heart of a diesel train pulsing in the serious wind, 
world pressing down even as pintails dipped in the rushes,

herons hunched against the banks in some sort of supplication,

rusted oil wells in the marshes, mute as sculpted markers.

We drove past the geese a final time and headed back to town,

you asked what I was doing about eating. It’s just hard to cook

for one, I said, my few lame lunch ideas. I’m not there yet,

you said. Time, I said, same thing I always say. It’s different

for everyone, but time will not be hurried until one day
you feel less heavy, thoughts I stutter through when faced

with someone’s loss, not knowing what to say at all,

whatever could be said to explain the migrations
and disappearances, stark reversals of our seasons.