This poem is taken from PN Review 193, Volume 36 Number 5, May - June 2010.
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,
...
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,
...
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