Five Poems

In Memory of the Photographer Wilson ‘Snowflake’ Bentley, Who Died of Pneumonia after Walking through a Blizzard Near Jericho, Vermont, 23 December 1931

Beauty was, for him, cold,
hexagonal, perfect
in all its parts, beheld

once and once only. Locked
beneath his lens, light-spun
and light-refracting, flecked

with coal dust and pollen,
his flakes shone with lunar
loveliness … And we can

see, in these hundred-year-
old prints, plain evidence
of his attention, care,

and chilling confidence:
in the manifold world,
its willed evanescence,
...