Six squirrels on the dead ash and the living pear.
No. Seven. Swish of tails across the branches.
They’ve pulled me from my sick chair to watch them
skip, stop. Fly back up the snowy trunks. White tails!
They bounce on such slender limbs. Now two or three
go high over the barn—and they’re chasing back down.
I’m just cold hands, cough, and white dust for a mind.
The nurse on the phone this morning calls it brain-fog.
But no, more like Covid snow. I suppose either
way, weather’s how we track the changes inside.
The snow is done. Squirrels have moved on. No, wait—
a few flakes come dusting down, where one limb shakes.
“Covid Snow” first appeared in The New Yorker, August 11, 2025.
ABOUT THe POEM:
I wrote “Covid Snow” in the late winter of 2025. In the previous November my partner Page and I spent about three weeks in Italy – crowded restaurants, taxis, trains, buses, streets – and of course there were overseas flights there and back. No Covid. For New Years Eve we went to a friend’s apartment in New York City for an early dinner, just 7 people. One was coughing. I flew back home to Ohio a couple of days later. And two days after that, I tested positive for Covid, my second bout. I’d gotten a booster in early November. It wasn’t awful, but I got a Paxlovid prescription from my doc and that seemed to help. But a week after I recovered, I tested positive again from, apparently, the Paxlovid rebound.
So I spent most of January in quarantine, in a big cozy chair, looking out my back windows at the snow and trees and squirrels and the gray cold sky. Soup and water and blankets and my meds and now and then a grilled cheese or something like that. It wasn’t awful.
I jotted some notes, and then, in March, over a few weeks I wrote, rewrote, and finished the poem.
ABOUT THE POET:
David Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, and Hudson, New York. His new book of poems, Transit, was published on January 12 by W. W. Norton. He is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Denison University, and for many years he served as Poetry Editor of Kenyon Review.
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