Snow

It’s snowing in Portland, Oregon. This is a big deal for us. It’s the first time this year. 

When it snows here, the city shuts down. We don’t have street-clearing equipment because we so seldom need it. Snow, for us, is rare. Unhoused people suffer horribly. The bravest among those who are housed walk out into the crunch of it, marveling, so this is snow. Wow. 

Sue and I don’t get to spend the weekend together because the roads are not passable. No Valentines Day celebration. 

Despite the snow, the mail is being delivered, and in the mail I found a book sent to me by Pilipo, and I think it’s possible Connections also had something to do with it. It’s African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020), edited by Kevin Young. I have loved poetry since I learned to read, wrote it as soon as I could write, taught it as soon as I was old enough to teach anything. I was familiar with about half the poems in this volume, many among my all-time favorites.. I looked for a poem I had never read before, and I found this one: 

“How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This”

By Hanif Abdurraqib

dear reader, with our heels digging into the good
mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something

about the dandelion head & how it is not a flower itself
but a plant made up of many small flowers at its crown

& lord knows I have been called by what I look like
more than I have been called by what I actually am &

I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this
exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning

something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything
worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive

to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather
clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent

heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning,
you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

Hanif Abdurraqib was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1983 (by which time I had already been teaching for about a decade). He has published three books of his poetry and is also an essayist and music critic, and he has a website. He works hard and fast. I don’t know what he looks like, but I feel him in my bones.