Because you have asked for a poem about snow, 
I have tried to think of my first memory of snow. 
I have tried very long and very hard to remember 

if I was a child in my carriage while my mother was pushing me, 
with difficulty, through the slush of the melting snow 
of late March in front of our apartment building in Manhattan, 

on Washington Heights, or if the first snow I remember 
was in Montreal. I remember it took seven hours on the bus, 
and when we arrived at the hotel, they said they didn’t have a room, 

they were full, and we had to find a room somewhere else, 
but it was raining, I remember it was rain falling down on the street, 
not snow. I remember very well. Perhaps the first was the snow 

I played in with my brother after we moved to the Bronx, 
how in the winter we used cardboard boxes instead of sleds 
because we didn’t have sleds, but I don’t remember. 

Maybe the first snow I remember wasn’t even real snow 
but was fake snow inside those water-filled, baseball-sized glass 
globes we had as kids. My daughter had one on a shelf in her room. 

I remember shaking it and watching the fake snow swirl and fall 
and swirl and fall and swirl and fall and swirl and fall. 
I’m sorry I can’t say for sure. It seems rather sad now that I read 

this over. But you know the word snow does appear a lot, 
and a poet once said that to discover what any poem is all about, 
you just seek out the noun that appears the greatest number of times, 


and that’s what the poem is all about. So here is your poem about snow. 
He was a very famous poet, you know. 
Please remember that.
                        

Just as green as it is in summer, 
even greener perhaps,
but the leaves rolled lengthwise into mysterious, 
dark green scrolls, 
into dark green fingers hanging from dark 
green hands in the cold. 
Now you can see it more clearly for what it is. 
It is wood. 
It has a body of wood, a thin, scrawny 
body of wood, scrawny and thin 
but as wooden as any oak tree, as any pine or ash or cedar.
Now you can see it for what it is: 
Thin, scrawny maker of amazing blooms, 
sly old singer, experienced, confident before singing,
head bowed, hands folded, 
waiting in the wings.