Snow Line
    by John Berryman

It was wet & white & swift and where I am

we don’t know.  It was dark and then

it isn’t.

I wish the barker would come.

There seems to be to eat

nothing.  I am unusually tired.

I’m alone too.

 

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,

I’d say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.

Where are his notes I loved?

There may be horribles;  it’s hard to tell.

The barker nips me but somehow I feel

he too is on my side.

 

I’m too alone.  I see no end.  If we could all

run, even that would be better.  I am hungry.

The sun is not hot.

It’s not a good position I am in.

If I had to do the whole thing over again

I wouldn’t.
 

“John Berryman wrote with a deeply felt, almost devout simplicity in
Snow Line, a hushed, mysterious, strangely affecting re-imagining
of the poet as a supplicant lamb lost in the snow.” – Rodney Phillips,
The Hand of the Poet, p. 215