Snow in Montana
What Ms. Hutchinson would think of me now, I do not care to know;
Seated at my ease, sipping coffee from Colombia,
Attended by a thousand swirling doting motes of snow
Outside the truck stop window,
Caught in the beam of a Ford headlight.
Oh, unhappy dispensation from honest toil!
To spend a vain and idle wintry day in
Wanton dalliance with impious books;
To speak with Lucretius in pagan oracles of the soft
Fallen snow—of the atoms at the heart of every flake—
Of the pinnacles and drifts that build up
Slowly, accumulating like a Puritan's holy scorn
On pickups and diesel pumps and the soft
Blushing cheeks of laughing people.
Ah, the shame of it! Methinks I ought to
Hide my face, and glower in the darkness
Of that Casino in the back.
