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Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) The Sound of Snow Snow falls in the dusk of Connecticut. The stranger Looks up to the glutenous sky, and it is remembrance That tickles the end of his nose like the fingertips Of a child and remembrance that touches the end of his Tongue with the antique purity and coolness of the snow, As if this were almost the beginning, the first snowstorm Fluttering between his house and the serious hemlocks. And best of all is the sound of snow in the stillness, A susurration, the minute percussion of settling flakes; And the stranger listens, intent to the whispering snow In the fir boughs, earth’s most intimate confiding, And he thinks that this is the time of sweet cognizance As it was once when the house, graying in old dusk, Knew him and sang to him, before the house forgot. In the last moments of day the earth and the sky Close in the veils of snow that flutter around him, Shutting him in the sphere of the storm, where he stands In his elephantine galoshes, peering this way and that At the trees in their aloofness and the nameless house Vanishing into the dark; and he stamps his feet urgently Turning as if in anger away from an evil companion. Yet when, like a warning just at the fall of darkness, Yellow light cries from the window above the house, From the boy’s room, from the old sixteen-paned window, The stranger remembers the boy who sits in the light And turns the glass sphere, watching to see the snowstorm Whirling inside. And the stranger shivers and listens To the tranquil and lucid whispering of the snow. ...

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