Welcome back to the daily poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Donald Hall. He lived from 1928 to 2018. He died last year in the summertime.

One of the great American poets, writer, editor, literary critic. He even was the poetry editor, the first

poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1950s. And in 2006, he was named the 14th Poet Laureate

Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, also known as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called

the snow. I'm going to read it and then make an attempt at a few comments and say why I read it,

and then as usual, I'll read it again. This is it, the snow by Donald Hall.

Snow is in the oak.

Behind the thick, whitening air which the wind drives, the weight of the sun presses the snow

on the pane of my window.

I remember snows and walking through their first fallen cities, asleep or drunk with

the slow, desperate falling. The snow blurs in my eyes

with other snows. Snow is what must come down, even if it struggles to stay in the air with the

strength of the wind. Like an old man, whatever I touch, I turn to the story of death. Snow is what

fills the oak and what covers the grass and the bare garden.

Snow is what reverses, sidewalk, house, and lawn into the substance of whiteness.

So the washer sleeps himself back to the baby's eyes.

The tree, the breast, and the floor are limbs of him, and from his eyes he extends

a skin which grows over the world. The baby is what must have fallen, like snow. He resisted

the way the old man struggles inside the airy tent to keep on breathing. Birth is the fear of death

and the source of an old hope. Snow is what melts. I

...