Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
First Snowfall
It is touching
the highest fingers
of the trees
which have longed
for it all this time,
and it is sifting down
over the store with the sign
in the window
that says Come in
we’re open and the sign
on the door that says
We’re closed,
and it is blowing
across the gray stacks
of lumber and the jacked-
up trailer of a semi
at Dan’s Custom
Sawing, and on the Rome
Road it is coming down
on the shoulders
of telephone poles
struggling uphill carrying wire
to the double-wide
and the farmhouse
with the year-round Christmas
lights, in season once more,
and slowly, softly in the dark
it is once more
bearing down
on the old, collapsing barn
to squeeze the row
of windows
shut, nobody up
to see it fill the driveways
and walkways except
a snowplow
holding a small light
ahead of itself opening the street
that vanishes in the long
drift and dream
of it, coming down
over the whole town
where everyone
under every
last, lost
roof is now far away
and all gone
and good night.
Wesley McNair is the author of nine poetry collections. His most recent book is the memoir The Words I Chose (Carnegie Mellon, 2012). He has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, and countless other honors, including the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry (for Fire); the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal (also awarded to Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, et. al.) for his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters;” and two honorary doctoral degrees for literary distinction. McNair has served three times on the nominating jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, his work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over fifty anthologies and textbooks. Among the magazines that have published his work: AGNI, AGNI Online, The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. McNair recently retired from the University of Maine at Farmington, where he directed the creative writing program. He was recently selected for a United States Artist Fellowship as one of America’s “finest living artists.” (updated 10/2012)