I
It’s pieces of sky reflecting the ground
She whispers from deep within her loamy
Brown eyes, the watchful ones she inherited
From her earnest aunt and her laughing mother.
A flood of flakes fall across the window
And pass their questions on to a landscape as stormy
As her eyes. She proofs the other weather
In sentences of twinned, lonely footprints
That trail off beneath the sad light of day’s lid
Closing eyes that fill up with falling snow…
Unlike poems, a child’s daydreams are foolproof.

II
My daughter knows poetry, although
She thinks outside rhyme and meter’s weather.
The craft escapes her, but genius will grow
With increasing accumulations.
The day snows and snows and snows, and she over-
Excites herself. The promise of being
Buried up to the roof in it settles her
To comedy in cataclysmic images
And seismic euphoria and metaphoric
Meteorology: Snow is so freeing.
It’s cold and white and crests her roof before noon.

III
The snow is like earth’s shadow in the sky.
She’s expert at the poetic make-up of a sigh
Too young for real grief. My daughter, full
Of syllogisms of the heart, knows the kind
That matter to this falling play of time
Dancing its old jig in her youthful blood. It thrills
Her soul back to earth to find the ground.
For if (as she sweeps her glances through a room)
All love is deep and all deep things return
Then it is for and to love that love is born –
Even as all things turn from time to time to grief.