Five Snows in Autumn

I
Surprise September snow
shocks fireweed to femme fatale:
ashen, quenched,
unpollinated.

II
Berry bushes wilt,
pummeled hard by autumn rain
spreading beds awash
with sleet, sweet iciness
a coverlet, pillowing frost
each morning’s gilded bread.

III
October night of comets, falling stars,
calls for eiderdown and more wood,
a morning world drawn
irrevocably pale.

IV
Midnight snow lights city streets,
penetrates dark sleep. Clouds
mound heavy, lowering,
luminous, wrap
each steaming house
in silence.

V
There are as many types
of hearts as snowflakes.
Under a crusty base, whatever stays
will cool and smolder, growing
under time.

by Buffy McKay
 

Buffy McKay is Inupiaq and Scottish; her parents were Ida Traeger McKay from Unalakleet, Alaska, and William McKay from Glasgow, Scotland. Buffy has attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Key West Literary Seminar & Workshops, and hopes to complete her B.A. in the near future. Buffy's poems have been published in the Anchorage Daily News (2008 Editor's Choice award), the anthology Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment, and the new literary journal Cirque. Buffy's personal mission is "to see the world in as many ways as possible," and this includes living in Anchorage.