He Gives Snow like Wool

by Dave Mehler

He gives snow like wool;

he scatters frost like ashes.

He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs;

Let’s fly to Svalbard, love, wrap the green light around us, pull

it down out of the sky, cling together like magnets at the pole

and realign, drawn from above, getting as close as we can to

the true north surrounded by frigid seas frothing white with waves

which pound and pound on the black lifeless rocks that edge

that island paradise, paradisiacal because you are love there

with me—

Let’s drive to eastern Oregon and glimpse a ring of fire

eclipse with cowboy friends going back to a place spent in youth

and reminisce what’s been lost and left, but ask for it back, trusting

in a return from that tired sky of orange after clouds break and striate,

forming streets of peaking vivid rust while hundreds of calves stand

struck stupid, big eyes startled and wondering along with us on that wide plain

toward the playa of sagebrush deer walked, hare haunted, empty,

the low mesa distant, grounded

beneath the ancient sun

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Dave Mehler lives in McMinnville, Oregon. His chapbook, God Truck Nature, appeared in the chapbook anthology, Burning Gorgeous: Seven 21st Century Poets, edited by Pamela O’Shaughnessy (Robertson Publishing, 2010). He served as an administrator at the popular online global forum/workshop, The Critical Poet. More recently, he served on the board of the Oregon Poetry Association. His full-length poetry collections are Roadworthy (Aubade Publishing, 2020) and Bad Is Bent Good (Aubade Publishing, 2025). He is currently shopping a manuscript of love poems, Cloud Street, and is working on another, The Afterward. He works as a driver at a landfill near Portland.