ARS POETICA WITH SNOW

        “Who taught me to know instead of not to know?” – Jean Valentine

by Christine Kitano

Sunk in the marrow of winter,
mounds of snow banked into glacial walls
between the parked cars, the gray haze

of it all just visible through the stained-glass
window of Coleman’s Authentic Irish pub;
Syracuse, New York. It’s been four months

since your arrival, a cross-country move 
to upstate New York to study poetry, to be
a real writer, snowbound and serious; and now

here you are, tipping back your first taste 
of whiskey, the thick inch of honeyed light burning
your throat, its ballooning blaze buffering the pangs

of everyday worry: the heating bill, books bought
but unread, and rust threading the car’s undersides, that
unceasing forward plunge as you slam, and again

slam your boot against its wheezing pedal. 

But now you can see, as if for the first time, 
the penny-colored ceiling tiles hammered 
with their Celtic knot procession, the winter

sunlight splashed into a dim rainbow
above the barback mirror–all the patterns, all
the colors.Who taught us to know

instead of not to know? And now, maybe,
in the moment before you drop the glass tumbler– 
strangers huddled in bulking coats, freckles 

of snow slow dissolving on wet wool, stout
tulip glasses hung upside down like stilled
bells, each image coming into focus only

when the sharp lens of intention blurs–maybe
you’re finally learning something after all–as
the tumbler, its contents of time and light, slips 

your open fist–

Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press) won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University and also serves on the poetry faculty for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.