One of the distinct pleasures of reading poems is the verbal excitement that occurs when two extremely unlike things are joined, even “yoked by violence” by way of a metaphor or a shift of context. Here, a bracing winter day outdoors gives way to a genial indoor evening of food, drink and head-to-head poker with a pal, all of it as natural and purposeless as the drifting descent of a snowflake.
Winter Trivia
It takes approximately two hours for a snowflake to fall
from a cloud to the ground.
—THE BOOK OF TRIVIA
In the roughly two hours
it takes for a snowflake
to fall from a cloud to the ground,
we managed to get back to the house,
bang the snow off our boots,
shake out our coats in the mudroom.
then stoke the stove back to life,
open a bottle of wine—
I think it was a red from Oregon—
heat the white bean soup from last night,
which we spooned up
sitting close to the splintering stove,
after which we carried our bowls
to the kitchen and opened
an inlaid wooden box full of chips
and fanned out a fresh deck of playing cards,
which you shuffled and I cut,
as the house was warming up,
and you tossed in a modest bet
with a red Jack showing
and I saw you with my nine
just as that singular snowflake
landed without a sound
in the general darkness of Vermont.
Billy Collins served as a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate (2001–03) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book of poems is Water, Water (Penguin Random House, 2024). “Winter Trivia” is a poem from that collection.