Weekly Read: “To See How the Snow Blanketed the Trees” by Cory Brown
BLR’s Weekly Read brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “To See How the Snow Blanketed the Trees” by Cory Brown, from BLR Issue 40.
Want your Weekly Read sent straight to your inbox? Subscribe here to receive our newsletters, including updates on events, issues, and more.
To see how the snow blanketed the trees
along Taughannock Creek Road, I turned off
Route 96 this morning. It was as if, as geese
maybe, angels had waved their wings to scoff
at the ordinary. All the white made me think
of my father in his coffin many years ago,
and of my dear brother, who I watched sink
into his grave just last week, at 70, but a blow
to me as if he’d been much younger…
Why this poem?
“Perhaps it’s just the mention of geese in this poem that puts me in mind of Mary Oliver – but the quiet lyricism of this assured, reflective voice brings, like Oliver, a majesty to evanescent human lives. Brown gently lulls us into recognition of the trick of the light we all must use to disavow our own impending ends.”
– Kate Falvey, BLR Associate Editor
More from Cory
Cory Brown grew up in Western Oklahoma. He is a graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program and has taught writing at Ithaca College. His last three collections of poems—A Long Slow Climb, What May Be Lost, and elisions—are from Cayuga Lake Books. His poems have appeared in Bomb, Nimrod International, West Branch, Sentence, december, Northwest Review, The Fiddlehead, and Postmodern Culture, among others. His essays have appeared in South Loop Review, Journal of Narrative Politics, and Writing on the Edge.