A Poet Reflects

4.

You think of snow,
The blank page that forgets us
The strangers we grow into.

Sometimes we burn so cleanly
There is nothing left.
There is the hotel in the rain

The man and his wife arguing,
The mastodon’s stillness,
The migrations of birds.

—Larry Levis, section 4 of “Waking” in The Afterlife (The University of Iowa Press, 1977)