"Bell" by Cecily Parks

Writers, artists and photographers help us appreciate the natural world through the lens of their sensitivity and unique vision. Our selection of responses from the arts begins with a poet who transforms snow through her associative genius.


Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collection Field Folly Snow. She recently earned a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, she teaches poetry writing at Columbia University.

This poem first appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion magazine, located in Great Barrington, MA. Their website is www.orionmagazine.org.

Bell

This newness of snow. This boot-ringing 

as the snow warms in the sun to crush. These holes 

we wind around the witnessing pines. This

violation of white. This slowness of moose. 

This counting of steps. This counting of scars 

in the bark: the warty burl bulging low 

on the trunk, the black-scratchings left

by a bear learning to climb. This counting

of sleeps between this country & the next country 

we call home. These branches shucking off 

the statuesque in avalanches of needles & ice. 

This progress, as in the wind-scalloped snowmeadow 

pretending to be moon. This love that sets us scrambling 

over the map’s last ridge, our red hoods bright

in shrunken sky. This metallic weather in which we 

are the ore. This alder. These crimson-tipped willows 

reverberating next to a river of turquoise ice. This 

following the deep tracks of one coyote stepping 

where another has stepped. This wilderness 

that we trespass, burning like berries in the juniper 

& becoming the air in the belfry.

     

                           By Cecily Parks