Under hemlocks, half-moons of melt
where deer bedded down, curledbodies heating cold earth. All night,
they pass under our windows,leave single-file paths through spring
snowfall, their startles and sidestepsspelled out in shiny black pinecones of scat
sunk in white. Restless and hollowedby winter, we break trail for each other,
step easily into each other’s steps.I follow the hearts of their hoofprints
to pockets of leaves they’ve nosed upwhere I breathe in their prophesy of soften
and root down, rise up and green.
Snow after Snow
Hayden Saunier
Feature Date
- May 19, 2018
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Copyright © 2017 by Hayden Saunier
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Hayden Saunier is the author of Tips for Domestic Travel (Black Lawrence Press, 2009), a St. Lawrence Award Finalist, and Say Luck (Big Pencil Press, 2013), which won the 2013 Gell Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Field Trip to the Underworld (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), won the Keystone Chapbook Award. Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and the Robert Fraser Award. A poet, actor, and teaching artist, she holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
West Caldwell, New Jersey
“The interconnectedness of everything on earth, how we belong to it all, how permeable boundaries are between us and the natural world, how things sing and what they sing of are rendered with aching acuity. Whether a poem’s focus shines on a “rump sprung sofa,” a turkey vulture, or dazzling autumn trees described as “sugar maple drama queens,” even evanescence becomes rich and luminous in these poems. This is a gorgeous, precise and deeply graceful collection.”
—Amy Gerstler
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