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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy
About her work, Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Winter
A Winter Without Snow
by J. D. McClatchy
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
by William Shakespeare
Fishing in Winter
by Ralph Burns
From "Snow-Bound," 11:1-40, 116-154
by John Greenleaf Whittier
Heavy Snowfall in A Year Gone Past
by Laura Jensen
How like a winter hath my absence been (Sonnet 97)
by William Shakespeare
Now Winter Nights Enlarge
by Thomas Campion
Spellbound
by Emily Brontë
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
The Snow Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Visionary
by Emily Brontë
Toward the Winter Solstice
by Timothy Steele
Winter-Time
by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Why is the Color of Snow?  
by Brenda Shaughnessy

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.



From Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2008. Copyright © Brenda Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.
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