I toss a handful into the air.A handful of nonspecific stuff.What is this that my hands are tossing?I’m tossing handfuls of snow into the air.Where am I getting all this snow on a summer’s day?It must come from somewhere inside me.I’m tossing handfuls of somewhere everywhere, all the wayup into the air, and it’s flitting down and amassingatop the immaculate townships.Tin roofs. Church steeples. Lines of parked cars.Summer is a pure lone mountain.Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue lonelinessas a figure wilts far below and wonders,How can snow fall without falling in love?Wherever I go, my furthest thoughts are lightly billowing.Whatever is buried within me, I keeppulling out in tufts.I hope that when I feel cold, you can feel what I feelbut without feeling any cold.Because I have struggled to do so,I choose to believe thatnot all sadness comes from somewhere.The sadness that comes from somewhere drifts downand mixes with the sadness that isn’t from anywhere.All of us are ordinary people. None of uscan escape the difficult natureof being thrown awayby a warm afternoon in winter.
Handfuls
Feature Date
- August 4, 2024
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First appeared in The Yale Review, Volume 112, No. 2 (Summer 2024 Issue).
https://yalereview.org/issues/summer-2024
Copyright © 2024.
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Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Volume 112, No 2: Summer 2024
New Haven, Connecticut
Yale University
Editor
Meghan O'Rourke
Managing Editor
Will Frazier
Since 1911, The Yale Review has been publishing new works by the most distinguished contemporary writers—from Virginia Woolf to Vladimir Nabokov, from Robert Frost to Eudora Welty. The journal’s pages have, for almost a century, been filled with the most exhilarating and astute writing of our times. Under the editorship of Meghan O'Rourke, a best-selling poet and memoirist, The Yale Review presents up-and-coming writers, explores the broader movements in American thought, science, and culture, and reviews the best new books in a variety of fields.
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