Snow Falling Through Smoke

Abstract

Snow Falling Through Smoke Sean O’Brien (bio) Snow was falling through the smoke. The lightWas the same as the beef tea I set by the bed.Was I a relative? A servant? Hard to say,Since everything resigned itself to duty.When I was a child and called awayFrom reading to be useful in the house,I saw what must become of me. And nowI felt myself abandoned by my name,To watch that yellow face that wouldn’t die:This year, next year, then my turnTo wear the grave-clothes in the attic bed.I knew that I must leave the room, and when I didI heard the snow, as if I were not there,But was an ear, an afterwards, a nobody,Perpetual and incomplete among the smokeThat hung along the ridges of the roofs,A flake of icy rage among the millionsTo whom the blizzard was the sum of things.For hours I stood at the head of the stairsBeneath the dim deadlight, with nothing in mindExcept that I must rouse myself or else be lost.And yet I could not see my way. The house itselfSeemed far off then, forgotten, like somethingAlready surrendered. I say it was madnessThat came up around me, as water will coilThrough the decks of a ship. Too lateFor these reflections, I remarked, and then was gladThat there was no one present who might hear,And, with an effort, gathering myself at last,Pretending not to listen to the snow,Went back into the bedroom, since I must. [End Page 55] Sean O’Brien Sean O’Brien’s tenth collection of poems, It Says Here, is to be published by Picador in autumn 2020. His work has received awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He has translated the Inferno, as well as works by Aristophanes, Fortino Cortes, and Lope de Vega. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications