Esta nevando



Another December in Arizona, Dad…somewhat of a season, skinny saguaros, silent sentinels casting tattle tell shadows, they spell out the selfish summer months and I know that our droughts were different, never sent you the picture album like I promised and so you’ll never see it.

Inordinately unfamiliar, no creek water spilling over plank paddle baskets to turn a grist mill wheel, I’m older here but I still cut the dust and crack a beer on every dirt road, disappear in a cattail clump, applaud keystone species like the beaver and delight in their natural state of childlike chicanery, anyway, I bought myself a couple proper coats one winter to quietly coast but I couldn’t, hung below naked bulbs, saw your emptied closet, and it all got me to thinking, just maybe you’d remember the first time your daughter saw snow.

It’s 1988, I’m five, sit middle in the single cab Mazda, always, jump seat, fishing crescent shaped Amana-brand ice cubes from your liquor cup, carsick stricken less than often and accustomed to hard and sudden truck-bed stops, sleeping under stars between you and mom, ever your faithful gear shifter, never missed my shot, complaintless, conscious and suspicious as fairy tales were recounted in the car, not read, so any fears I developed were shelved beside the books you never bought, I’d become a master class paper bag puker, a camper shell stowaway eating the butt end of some old venison summer sausage, a connoisseur of carbon monoxide gas and twice branded by a tailpipe I insisted was not really that hot, I understood death - witnessed the functional duplicity offered by a 5-gallon lidded bucket and a shop vacuum hose fitted to the exhaust, if you ever need to get rid of some unwanted kittens at no cost, I am and always was, your principled protege, patient, calm, polite as f*ck.

I’m steady, I’m little
I’m tasting my first icicle
I’d never seen snow
Pink corduroy coat clad
A hand-me-down jacket
Two pairs of socks are gloves
Saw jagged-eye cotton ghosts
Peppermint white, a frozen pecan grove
Tossed wrinkled sheets
Under a nickel plated mirror sky
Bee sting blizzards and whooping cough cranes
Folded facsimiles
My paper cut memories
Snowflake dreams in the night
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Written on December 23, 2022

Submitted by cannondaughtrey on December 27, 2022

Modified by cannondaughtrey on December 27, 2022

1:55 min read
26

Quick analysis:

Scheme X A X BBAXXXXXXXXCCX
Characters 2,240
Words 384
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 1, 1, 1, 14

Cannon Stewart Daughtrey

Archaeologist and archivist of memories, smells, and the value of everyday people as collected and told in someone else’s stories, or in their own. more…

All Cannon Stewart Daughtrey poems | Cannon Stewart Daughtrey Books

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