Snow Trails

By on Feb 22, 2016 in Poetry

Snowy trail with bench
It’s been snowing all day, large dry
    flakes floating down without leaving
a trace except on walking trails I’ve built

that curve round the house like a Priest’s
    surplice, before descending to a mountain
stream in the hollow, where massive boulders,

heaved up from the earth long ago, make
    deep pools beside white water thrust against
granite. Inuits believe snow has many voices

and snow sticking to only one surface might
    be a voice ‘gently speaking’, a sign of grace,
or maybe ‘the narrowness of the gate’. Next

spring when I walk the trails through rough
    terrain in a Monk’s devotion to clear away
and repair winter’s ravage, I’ll guide my old

yellow wheelbarrow full of woodchips with an
    acolyte’s grip as I spread them, trying to keep
weeds, slices of stone chipped off by freeze

and thaw and hard January winds’ breaking
    branches that make fugitive, trails a snow’s
hoary crest seemed to pledge my protection

against anything keeping them from blessings
    they offer to the mystery of a soul in its rising.

About

As an athlete, English Teacher, lover of music, father, husband and citizen of the world, Larsen Bowker finds the themes and ambiguities which flourish in his poems. He is particularly grateful to magazines like Wild Violet, who offer him a place where his love of poetry finds a place where his words find a larger audience. In the illustrations that accompany their poems, readers find a way to take more from the poem than they would otherwise. He has had poems appear recently in Atlanta Review, Coal City Review, and Common Ground Review. His seventh book of poems, Elegiac Dialogues, came out in 2017.