First Snow
Arthur Sze
A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:
imbibing the silence,
you stare at spruce needles:
there’s no sound of a leaf blower,
no sign of a black bear;
a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
against an aspen trunk;
a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.
You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:
when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;
the world of being is like this gravel:
you think you own a car, a house,
this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these
things.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and stood at Gibraltar,
but you possess nothing.
Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
and, in this stillness,
starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.
About this poem
“One day I was startled by a rabbit that moved and stopped, moved and stopped across a gravel driveway. The poem radiated from that spark.” – Arthur Sze
About Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze is the author of “Compass Rose” (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Santa Fe, N.M.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Arthur Sze. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org, Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
