The Last Snow

by Hadley Hury

She asks to go out on the screened porch

for a few minutes where she sits silhouetted

against the whitened ground, licking her paws

and back-brushing her head, luxuriating

in the only kind of winter in which she sees

any point whatever. She knows it’s an

unexpected evanescence, a gentle safe

amusement, and on her mouth and in her fur

she savors, secure from her prospect,

the vestiges of  a good breakfast.

The snow keeps tumbling insistently down

yet even though the morning light is muted, ashy,

and obscured it still is nonetheless

the light of March, and the bright bare unthreatened trees

merely feign a ghostliness, murmuring

together, sharing the joke of their costume.

Like the cat on the porch they know

this is nothing to be taken seriously,

there is no ice, no bitterness, and in

a day or two the memory of this elegant

anachronism will tickle up their roots,

and the breeze, soughing once more from the south,

will tease goldfinches from their inmost branches,

congratulate the brave forsythia

and the flagrant youth of green and tender mosses,

and lift the waiting eager chins of daffodils.

HADLEY HURY's poetry and short fiction has appeared in Image, Appalachian Heritage, Avatar, Forge Journal, Vox Poetica, Meadowland Review, The Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, The Penwood Review, Broad River Review, Off the Coast, The James Dickey Review and other journals. He is a former teacher, senior executive for not-for-profit organizations focusing on the environment and women’s health; he is also a film critic and lecturer, and the author of a novel and a short story collection. Born in Memphis, he has lived in New York, Denver, and Atlanta, and now resides with his wife Marilyn in Louisville, Kentucky.

*cat photo courtesy the author