Classic Poem

What is it in the white birch? How
are we to construe such whiteness
as, of a dull day, over snow,
the birches are ermined in,
doing something odd to the light
so they seem to have filtered it,
or themselves are its residue: Light
without motion. . . . How

do they come to stand there
among the meltwater-blackened
maple and hickory trunks,

coming up out of the same glum
sod—these arboreal angels you'd
think could grow only
on the summit of a white cloud?











By permission of the author.