First Snow

Abstract

of this earth." The father seems as rootless as Walking John Gay, whose words bring back to mind the river of earth metaphor: "They's a world of dirt flowed under my feet. I never crawled when I was a baby. Just riz up and walked at ten months. I'm a-mind to see every living hill against I die." It is the father, and thus others in his train, who float on the surface of this river, knowing least the answer to Brother Sim Mobberly's question: Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying-the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us? Perhaps a little child, a nameless seven-year-old boy, shall lead them. Or perhaps a poet. It is likely they are the same. Surely the narrator of the poem, "River of Earth," is the child of vision, the naive observer, the innocent seer of the novel. The boy has a yearning for poetry, "music not set to notes." When asked what he would do with a bagful of money, he says, "I'd buy me a broadside off the peddle-woman.' Here again in the novel we find the frustrated visionary , the one who knows, modestly, "least or all," what he will never understand. And so he turns to poetry. Poet and child are one. They are James Still. This is today's book, and tomorrow's. Silver Hills The first snowfall silvers the hills on upper reaches and turns each simple tree into delicate filigree. The hilltop becomes a frosted decoration each pine a Christmas tree. The autumn gold transmutes to winter silver. -David F. Moore First Snow Walnut and amber wrap me, rocking, relaxed in the scent of yeast bread, rising. Through the cold gleam of glass I watch black stripped tree arms cradle snow, iced, in winter silence. -Margaret D. Kirkland ...