Snow
I stood at the window with my mother
and watched a cluster of deer,
their summer red long gone.
The cracking bones of the house,
the heat rising from floor vents,
the click and toss of the dishwasher―
all of this was almost too much to bear.
But it was the snow that finished me,
the assuaging fall of some pure bread,
crustless and broken, how it erased
all distances, quieted the mountain jays,
and melted on the windows,
how it mocked my mother’s tears
as she pressed her face
against the glass and wept.
I pretended not to notice.
The deer blurred into a single stain
swallowed up in the whiteness.
Javen Tanner‘s poems have appeared in Roanoke Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, Dialogue, The Raintown Review, Irreantum, Psaltery and Lyre, Sunstone, and several other journals and magazines. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Curses for Your Sake and The God Mask. He was the winner of the 2011 Association for Mormon Letters poetry contest, and his poems have been included in the anthologies Fire in the Pasture and Moth and Rust. “Snow” first appeared on the Rock Salt Plum website in 2005. Also a playwright, Javen currently lives in Salt Lake City, where he is the Artistic Director of the professional theater company Sting & Honey, and the Dean of Arts at The Waterford School.
About the poem
►The poem is a simple memory of an experience I had when about eleven years old. I never found out why my mother was crying. I was too afraid to disturb the universe. Later, Isaiah 1:18 often made me think of that moment.
