Bruce Snider

Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit, (University of Wisconsin Press, Spring 2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, UTNE, and ZYZZYVA, among others. His awards include a James A. Michener Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, as well residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt House, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco. Source

Forecast

Today, I’m taking my father

for more tests, his eyes

failing even as we walk

out into the knee deep drifts.

Like his father before,

he takes two shovels from their hooks,

the particles of his hands

sewn somewhere in mine,

so much of him

silent in me as we walk

the bright hemorrhage of white.

He starts at one end,

I start the other, each scoop

unmaking the snow, which has taken

over porches, stoops, skeletal trees

hedging the road. Soon,

he won’t be able to make out the handle

he’s gripping. We don’t speak,

piling the crude heaps,

first him, then me, the black

grammar of railroad ties

announcing the perimeter.

The weatherman calls for more–

seven inches by nightfall–

but the old Chevy rattles

as I rev the engine,

my father leaning to scrape

the windshield clear of ice

until he’s certain I can see.

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2020

Themes:

Disability

Doubt & Fear

Family

Health & Illness