Snow

We've had occasion before on S&F to remark on author-defined "poems" that on clear-eyed inspection reveal themselves as nothing but garden-variety prose broken into (seemingly) arbitrary lines to create a "poem", and expressed our contempt for this widespread, invariably pretentious, invariably risible (and invariably ugly) postmodern literary excrescence. An infinitely more rare occurrence is the prose piece that's a genuine poem in everything but name, and fairly cries out to be set, mutatis mutandis, in enjambed poetic form. A lovely example of this is this editorial by writer Verlyn Klinkenborg for The New York Times that virtually sings from the page:

Last week felt like a last chance before winter. The snow melted, dying back until the vole trails became thin green paths through the remains of whiteness. The ice unbound itself from the rim of the horse tanks. One warm morning, a bat fluttered past my head, resting on the clapboards for a moment and then arcing around to the east side of the house. Despite the sense of relenting, the ground was still frozen solid.

And then it began to snow again — light, voluminous snow, swelling in the air and muffling every detail. Watching it, I felt a sense of intention in the weather, as if those mild days were just a way of clearing the canvas, scraping away the old paint, before laying down a fresh ground of white.

RTWT here.