Snow Globe

It was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it

the Sixties, and it was snowing.

Snow filling trash cans like ashtrays. Mom and Dad

distantly fighting the giant snowstorm.

I jellied the donut in my fist and dragged my Cheeto fingers

down the walls of the igloo.

Quiet murmur of voices muted by the snowy insulation.

Snowy machinery. War, a blue sky blower

somewhere else dreaming of rain…

It is snowing snowing and my snow castle is growing cold.

Cold like white poodles cruelly falling from the sky.

Cold like Conrad Aiken cruelly killing his children.

I am watching Silent Snow Secret Snow all alone, Orson Wells

booming about snow, the igloo

growing close, my rosebud cave.

 

O cold colding! endless snow globe of war. It’s Squid vs. Whale,

Firebird vs. Camaro, McNamara vs. the Jungle, etc, all heavenly white

machinery trapped in a snowy world, it was the Sixties, and it is snowing.

 

*Read and listen to the other two panels of Matthew Cooperman’s “American Triptych”:
No Ode
Postlude
Matthew Cooperman is the author of the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011), DaZE (Salt Publishing Ltd, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, as well as three chapbooks. A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and co-poetry editor of Colorado Review, he teaches in the Creative Writing program at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.