Like the time-frosted cataract
on my third eye, this tattered
fog of dust slowly weathers
beneath the hairline fissure
of the orb my grandmother
kept forever on her dresser.
It's sifting here fifty years,
a frozen smoke, upwards
invisibly where her palm-
sized-planet horizons darkly
into halves, the almost in-
discernable seam wizened
brown, as if groundwater
had found its natural pore
the way we are elides to were
until what rose inside was air.
There, the Little Flower gazes
calmly past a world she sees—
books, laptop, the whole array
of my office's objets trouve
the dear ghosts spurn—though
she's ankle-deep in wasted snow
that is marsh and mire, the gulf
bound for a farther atmosphere.
The Snow Globe by Daniel Tobin | Sandalwood & Rose Poetry Reed Diffuser
Among Daniel Tobin’s more than twenty books are The Mansions, winner of the National Indie Excellence Award and Gold in the Human Relations Book Awards, as well as Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by the New York Times. Other awards include the Julia Ward Howe Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Massachusetts Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation. He is also the author of Awake in America, Passage to the Center, On Serious Earth: On Poetry and Transcendence and The Odeon: Essays on Poetry. Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2026.
