Poet, biographer, and translator Peter Filkins is the author of H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds and The View We’re Granted, among other books. This poem, part of his forthcoming collection Water / Music, was inspired by something he observed in Ireland a few years ago. “Walking past a rain barrel” in the countryside, he says, “I noticed a thin layer of ice atop the water’s surface, one that reflected briefly the sky and snowflakes above, while also remaining transparent to the depths beneath. That’s a poem, I said to myself, and I wrote it that afternoon.”
ice on a rain filled barrel
a penumbra
of swollen gun cotton sky
absolving snow
to bury the inflected
reflected flakes falling
upon a chill mirror
buoyed in the barrel
by rain swallowed light
