Sisley’s Snow at Louveciennes, by Jack Ridl

Snow at Louveciennes, by Alfred Sisley (France), 1878.

Sisley’s Snow at Louveciennes
 
We see white on white, a woman
in the bleak centre of the canvas,
this cold holding onto the rolling
snow lying along the fences,
tree limbs, hipped roofs,
stone walls of the lost village.
On a cottage door, a quiet blot
of blue. Wrapped in a tatter
of brown, the woman, deep
in the landscape’s insistent flat,
has the anonymity of a still life.
She is your mother unable to return,
staring into the blizzard’s dread
beauty, seeing only the sky,
a mute wash of blue hanging fragile,
spare as the frozen air. She stands
bordered by the indifference
of daylight, imagines a cardinal
cutting its wound across the snow,
a cat crawling under a cottage,
curling its tail around its sleep. 

Jack Ridl


Jack Ridl's Practicing to Walk Like a Heron was named best collection of poetry for 2013 by Indiefab/ForeWord Reviews. His collection Broken Symmetry was selected by The Society of Midland Authors as the best collection of poetry for 2006. Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies for the Center for Book Arts (NYC) Chapbook Award. In April his new collection Saint Peter and the Goldfinch will be released. All three full collections are from Wayne State University Press.