Gary Snyder – “For Lew Welch in a Snowfall”

January 31, 2009 at 9:27 am (Gary Snyder, Poetry & Literature, The Beats)

 

Snowfall in March:

I sit in the white glow reading a thesis

About you. Your poems, your life

 

The author’s my student,

He even quotes me

 

Forty years since we joked in a kitchen in Portland

Twenty since you disappeared

 

All those year and their moments—

Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,

Poems tried out on friends,

Will be one more archive,

One more shaky test

 

But life continues in the kitchen

Where we still laugh and cook,

Watching snow.