After the Snow

by Linda Pastan

I’m inside

a Japanese woodcut,

snow defining

every surface:

shadows

of tree limbs

like pages

of inked calligraphy;

one sparrow,

high on a branch,

brief as

a haiku.

Here

in the Maryland woods, far

from Kyoto

I enter Kyoto.

From Almost an Elegy: New and Selected Poems (New York: Norton, 2022), page 95.