60 for 60: Snowtown

By Zachary Erickson

January can be a rather miserable month: after the excitement of the new year, one is left with the same old grayness. But a poet finds potential newness in every moment; and I find that, speaking of winter, snow can be an excellent excuse for a poem. Consider Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man“: one doesn’t forget a thing like that.

In 1995, Columbia Journal featured a poem by Phyllis Stowell called “Snowtown,” and I find it to be a beautiful accompaniment to a snowy day. Such wonderful complexity in its music: “each window’s window”; the windows by themselves do not suffice. Italics and parentheses round out the many voices, not of the sea, but of the snow, “the tedium of winter.” But I don’t want to paraphrase this poem; I enjoy it too much, and I expect that you will as well.

Snowtown

Phyllis Stowell

build in a city of snow

— Wallace Stevens

Momentous to see a householder on his roof shoveling
not once stopping to admire where he has done
or weigh the more to be done, his mountain

the next shovelful avalanches. Snow laps doors no one opens,
walks no one walks. Windowpanes
gleam glassy clean outside each window's window

where a shy schoolgirl steals a look and seeing you
seeing her, brightens—the rare sun come out
a bulwark in this village (what then?)

You pretend as you pass the brick Unitarian with its precise
Moore steeple, all is well
and shall be well

for the scarfed fellow buying Kotex for his wife, the substantial
for-sale potholders, the free coffee where you buy
But day stalls here, the falls

stiffen in the tedium of winter, an overlong second act
the citizen is forced to sit through
as in a claustrophobic theater (what then?)

You'd miss being lost in the forest with its acoustics
its bilingual utterances, now and forever
without a wild supremacy to propitiate