This week our January Poet-in-Residence, Lisa Russ Spaar, the much-published and much-honored winner of the  2009 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry and Director of the program in poetry writing at the University of Virginia,  examines the winter sky within and outside us all.  We publish this woman in gratitude for her gift of poems to Women’s Voices and in celebration of her ever vigilant scanning of the horizon of our lives.

Snow

Where is my sky, famished cache
of infinite breath, fasting,
impossible to hold, by which I know myself?

Instead, these close, flannelled bolts,
clownish shawls infinite & careless.
Do not be afraid, I murmur,

moving, muffled by scarves,
through curtailed acoustics,
swiping my temperant broom

across the flocculent path, fatted ivies,
a bustle of shrubbery lambs.
I am afraid, wrote my student,

mistakenly, of her grandmother’s
addled dementia, of her dimension.
So much southpaw gray matter

unfurling here, meteoric,
& silence eclipsing all thought,
so pure, so prodigal