Lost in the Snow
April 3 2014


Walking the dog
through the schoolyard, after dark.
Over hard-packed snow
pocked with little feet.

I feel like an intruder here,
with no permission slip
from the principal.
While she is off-leash
charging from smell to smell,
reconstructing recess
with the precision instrument
of her forensic nose.

Where the pent-up energy of kids
persists
in the frozen air,
shouting, bad-mouthing
stampeding the field.
The exuberance, and cruelty
of the playground;
the bullies, and those who watch,
the solitary kids
slouched against the fence.

The jungle gym is icebound.
Its frozen surface, unsafe.
Its tubular steel,
where wet gloves
curious tongues
freeze fast, and quick.

The plough has piled mountains
of ice-slicked snow.
I can see the king of the castle
holding court,
queen bees
tongue-lashing their followers.

The janitor left some lights on
to keep the riffraff away.
But we all know no one's inside
this time of night.
Just the dog and I
in the ghostly whiteness
of streetlights,
feeling watched
in their unwavering eye.

We are walking by the soccer net,
where an orphaned mitt
rests on the crossbar
tiny in pink.
A child, arriving home
with frostbitten fingers,
and was scolded for losing track.

But kids always lose things.
The ones who grow up fast,
and the innocents
who will
soon after.


We do this almost nightly. In the cool light of the streetlights. On the hard-packed snow of the schoolyard, where the residue of bootprints conjures up a playground of active kids.

The poem is about our illusions of childhood innocence: the cruelties and the testing, the exclusion and the cliques that we grown-ups both forget and overlook.

There is an undercurrent of menace running through the poem. It starts with "intruder" and "forensic", and then becomes more obvious with the bad-mouthing, the cruelty, the bullies, and the loners. The playground equipment has become dangerous. There are mountains of snow, where battles for status are fought. There is riffraff and prying eyes. And then what was lost in the snow.

There is something terribly poignant and melancholy about a child's orphaned mitten. I've used this trope before, and couldn't resist returning to it. The lost mitten, and the lost innocence that soon will follow: no turning back from adolescence, let alone adulthood.

(Although I may have no idea what really goes on at recess. The way we bubble-wrap kids these days, the jungle gym is probably cordoned-off, the piles of snow are out of bounds, and no one is allowed to throw snowballs or call anyone names. They probably won't even let them outdoors when it's cold!!)