Spring Snow

By William Matthews 1942–1997 William Matthews

Here comes the powdered milk I drank

as a child, and the money it saved.

Here come the papers I delivered,

the spotted dog in heat that followed me home

and the dogs that followed her.

Here comes a load of white laundry

from basketball practice, and sheets

with their watermarks of semen.

And here comes snow, a language

in which no word is ever repeated,

love is impossible, and remorse. . . .

Yet childhood doesn’t end,

but accumulates, each memory

knit to the next, and the fields

become one field. If to die is to lose

all detail, then death is not

so distinguished, but a profusion

of detail, a last gossip, character

passed wholly into fate and fate

in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

Source: Rising and Falling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979)

Biography

William Matthews's poetry has earned him a reputation as a master of well-turned phrases, wise sayings, and rich metaphors. Much of Matthews's poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the nature of human consciousness. In another type of poem, he focuses on his particular enthusiasms: jazz music, basketball, and his children. His early writing was free-form and epigrammatic. As his career has . . .

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