Stephanie Burt
Snow in Neuchâtel
As if we really had come
to earth from nowhere and needed
a visual cue, these collapsing scraps
of not-quite-ice across
the ground and branches and carefully-
prepared, don’t-cross grass terrain
of citizenship tell us our friends were ill,
or are ill, or will be, or may be. The limestone scars
and the poured concrete of the stairs
lead down and
down into the fluffed-
up chiaroscuro coverlet over the lake
at the simple, single limit of the town, the same town
that goes on
like a natural border or the edge
of thought. “Pretend
you’re a marble,” my father would say
when giving out
driving directions to his house, our
house. When we moved in
someone had to replace every light bulb.
By “someone” I mean “mechanics
he hired,” since we could not do the job.
The slope of the mountain is a giant’s arm,
its treetops pilled-up cotton
on a counterpane like the one
in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s
Garden of Verses, meant to keep the rough world out
and the warm kid in. For a while it works. When I was
sick and lay a-bed, I had
two pillows at my head. No one called me. No one
texted me. My mother believed I could live
that way and would love it, and was not
wrong, though I was neither
Steven nor
a son. And all
my toys beside me lay. What isn’t
temporary? What doesn’t
fade, pale, or turn
cold? Before you have to see
the frangibility in the snow globe
of white childhoods, you have
some choice—you can try
to leave your body. You can stay
under covers, an internal
emigré. The students in hatted, puffy-
jacketed coats, in knots and duos
on their lunch break
from the Lycée Jean Piaget still smoke
cigarettes, as if they never knew
what’s good for them, or else what else
would do. To keep
me happy all the day. Pale green
and faded brass, like windchimes, dangle
from still-uncovered twigs, as if they knew
we have no wish
to leave this world, though the queued
beech trees refuse
to shake their sifted aggregates
out over that smooth, hospitable avenue,
or the ramp, or the rails, so that
the already-built-
up snowfall
makes its exit instead
(wind having chosen for it) across
the patient lake, which in turn
has set itself up as the ideal, non-
judgmental listener,
having studied so much that it can now
afford to reflect,
or just to consider, every leaf,
twig, ash-fragment, or
particle: in a word, everyone.
Prairie Dogs
Cynomys ludovicianus
When all else
fails or falls, here is a place
it’s better to be. The paths
up to the grated rooftop
channels and tunnels that lead into sunlight
come with their own
storm drains and a slanted
slip for escape from flood, mud-
slides and the sadness of having lived far
too long inside
ourselves. The edges
crumble all the time and require
constant repair, but we keep them in shape through shared
governance, whose chirpy
conversation keeps us awake: we avoid
true hibernation. Here is our cabinet
of snacks (wheatgrass, dry
thistle, prickly pear, sage and other Artemisia
species tied in knots around
its stalks for efficient
storage). Here we keep beds
underneath our beds, the latter
carpentered out of tilled
earth for safety
purposes, the former being where
we lay our heads.
Though we rear live young we pretend
that we have been sitting on eggs,
seeing the pups unfold to their own
stature on the still-wet and fragile legs.
When we come of age we may choose
to lead our young in subterranean
expeditions, or rise
and inspect the dangerous sun, whose surface
greens and blues are not for everyone.
We can be social to a fault.
Our freeze response is well developed.
We keep our young so far that we are afraid
they feel unable, surrounded, enveloped.
Why would we want to go out
and see the rest of the world?
Everything we think
we need is here.
As for the dust storms and thin air
above us, we have specialists who go
out there to gather what we fear.
We have also built, from shed bits
of our own fur and tricked-out
twigs and thorns and rootlets, an easily-
closed excuse for a front door.
Of course the stacks
of pebbles that rise
sunward are artificial. We know
the biped that towers
over us placed them here
so that her giant bipedal
children can watch us pop
out of the friable ground. When we
watch them watch us, they too
make their own chirping sound.
Samphire
Blanche or boil,
with red pepper flakes and vinegar. Its salinity
converts the water content into brine.
A local harvest, or a dreadful trade--
hard to tell once the wet leaves enter the kitchen.
Ease comes from your own, or somebody else’s, toil.
There are, the chef told us last night, between five and nine
Korean restaurants in Ireland,
whose cold coasts and low mountains could have made
for some sort of natural affinity.
That and the being invaded.
Time to listen.
None of the stories I want to hear are mine.