This week’s poem opens with the work involved after a snowstorm, but, riding on a few simple words, the speaker quickly turns to consider how “to be happily effaced by awe, / that moment talk defers to silence.”

Betsy Sholl is the author of nine poetry collections including “Otherwise Unseeable” and “Rough Cradle.” A former poet laureate of Maine, Sholl lives in Portland and teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

This poem appears in “House of Sparrows,” Sholl’s collection of new and selected poems just published by University of Wisconsin Press. She will read and sign copies of her book at 7 p.m. Thursday at Longfellow Books in in Portland.

In the Aftermath

By Betsy Sholl

It’s all shovel and dig, snow banks

done up to glow, getting dirty.

 

All shove and dog, the world half riddle,

half proof. It’s fiddle and roof,

 

the “deedle dum” and shrug of prayer.

Icy streets, mincing steps, and later—

 

why not dance, sore shins into whirlwind,

till we can’t tell ourselves from God?

 

Of course we all know: Afterlife =

empty wallets, no shoes in the coffin.

 

And we know, before walking on ice,

to pull our hands out of our pockets.

 

Meanwhile somebody’s taking the long view,

reminding us mountains turn to silt.

 

Or sometimes I think “silk”—those Japanese screens

on which tiny people cross a bridge

 

overlooking a steep gorge,

as if that’s what we were wanting before

 

we forgot: to be happily effaced by awe,

that moment talk defers to silence.

 

Oh imperfect tense, oh past, unfinished

and progressive, help me

 

to actually be doing this,

stepping onto that tenuous bridge

 

beside the water’s plummet.

From House of Sparrows by Betsy Sholl. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem appears by permission.

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