The snow has started tonight
for another, hammering next door
with no money to keep the cold out
the poverty always with a hammer

winter, for another winter started
tonight to fall in through the windows,
the look to one by one all the bare
places filling with snow, bare

one and bare one stretching away under
the streetlights, on to the Great Plains
two thousand miles away—
That stretch is always in the snow, we go
home, they keep home around them here
fixing the door the windows next door
We keep hands together against the walls
poor and neighbors and the warmness
through the walls. The bare places
stretching and stopping and stretching, going on
again to those Great Plains where the wind
is not ending, filling the grasses
now, torn as we hammer the houses
to patch up the Hold in my hands
against the wall the snow melting
down the wall world another
winter falling into, starting again
tonight the blood going between
us, the poverty veining the
blood poor and snow falling

where people can stand together
in it and not talk,
but be the same, go the same way
home.

—13 Nov 62

Originally published in White Wall Review 40 (2016)