Kathleen Ossip

Snow Song

Clouds make a meaning of snow.
Snow is the meaning of clouds.
The tune of the snow is a color.
The history of snow’s in the stiffening gutter.

Headlights mock the snow (or vice versa).
The end of the snow is morning.
The sunlight rings the bell of snow.
Snow is dread rewarded.

The cliché of snow is quiet.
The intelligence of snow is private.
The truth of the snow is scientific.
The joke of the snow curls in my mitten.

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Do-Over, a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. She is a 2016-2017 Radcliffe fellow and editor of the poetry review website SCOUT.