Lulled by a Late Snowfall: “Iowa Dreams”

A few days ago, snow dusted the southern landscape. Winter’s last blast showed up in a flurry of images on social media. Memory took me back to my time in Iowa. Yards seemed snowbound from November to March. I once stepped outside for a midnight sojourn in a still garden—and walked away with a poem.

December rose raw and sunless; layers piled roadside gray
where plows threw snow, sand, and ice in gritty drifts
packed down into rough-hewn walls my shovel could not breach.
Christmas carols rang foreign; the birdbath brimmed with stone water.

My dreams rolled Midwest—May prairies greening
and sod breaking in rectangular patches
and my neighbor warning that cucumber seeds never burrowed
until Mother’s Day when peonies flirted in ruffled skirts.

The cold crept me awake, and I took a bundled turn
in the neighbor’s garden; my glove-dimmed fingers unlatched
the cypress moon gate, concrete foo dogs grimacing
on either side as blue hollies pricked the night blanket.

Woody vines weighted the arbor’s bones,
and river birches peeled salmon in the side yard
where needle-thin bird tracks ghosted—
a temple bell chimed copper prayers,

and I plunged boot-deep back to my deck and stopped
to brush off the fishnet metal top of Nannie’s patio table
that once baked on Georgia lemonade days. The wind had rounded
the snow in the laps of the ice-cream chairs, now her plump bridge foursome

greedy for the triumph of sweeping pennies into leather coin purses
that snapped shut, smartly enough, with kiss clasps—
and I longed for iron-worn bed sheets billowing in cumulus
motion on a clothesline as my father staked bean poles
in crooked clay rows and bent to plant Kentucky Wonders
before Good Friday thundered in the Appalachian foothills.

* * * * *

A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith (People Inc.), Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). Find the poem “Iowa Dreams” on page 1.

Hamrick’s poetry has appeared in Appalachian Places, Appalachian Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Citron Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, and elsewhere.

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