Water under Snow: Poems

By Ralph Stevens

Water under Snow explores the intersection between the human and natural worlds with an eye toward what can be celebrated in both. A central theme is the call to pay attention to both worlds while we "have world enough and time." The collection draws on imagery of the familiar, a bull moose in a school parking lot, loons on a lake seen through a window, a photographer on the Atlantic coast. Time plays a role in these relationships, as in poems that look back on childhood experiences, and in those that reflect on the mortality of things living and man-made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666722840

Ralph Stevens

Ralph Stevens is the author of the poetry collections, At Bunker Cove and Things Haven’t Been the Same. Individual poems have appeared in a variety of publications. He lives with his wife Sally Rowan in Ellsworth Maine.

Book preview

Water under Snow

Poems

Ralph Stevens

water under snow

Poems

Copyright ©

2021

Ralph Stevens. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

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8

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Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-3084-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-2283-3

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-2284-0

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December 17, 2021 9:13 AM

Drawings by Rebecca Powell

Cover photograph by Sally Rowan

Table of Contents

Title Page

Prelude: Chaos Theory

I

Whatever the Dawn

Walking the Main Street of Our Town

In the Mountains

A Grove of Birches

The Photographer

The River

Reversing Falls

The Commonplace World

The Arctic

The Bull Moose

The Loons of North Pond

The Fox

Devices and Desires

A Meditation in Rain

Nocturne

II

The Rain this April Morning

Traveling a Country Road

Waiting for the First Snow

Memento Mori

Bedroom Slipper

Dinosaur Mobile

The Dignity of Old Houses

How Is It That a Ruin

House of Stone

Taj Mahal

III

Magnetic Distance

Eyes on the Song

Death Cleaning

Galesburg, Illinois

The Rain in Movies

Triggering Town

Forgotten until Summer

Sea Chest

This New Year’s Morning

All in Good Time

At a Window

IV

Advent 2, 2020: The Trees Wait

Wild Horses

And Is This All I Get?

The Window

Water under Snow

Heavy with Last Night’s Rain

Three Bicycles

If Even the Stones

Graceland

World Enough and Time

Envoi: Sea Smoke

Acknowledgements and Thanks

To the town of Islesford, Maine,

its inhabitants, wild and domestic.

The world is still here, and there are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us.

W.S. Merwin

Prelude: Chaos Theory

A butterfly flaps aimlessly

across a field in