This poem came about as an assignment I gave my college freshman creative writing students. The assignment was to compose a poem that answered an “unanswerable” question. I don’t write poetry, except on occasion, and usually only when I’ve hit a wall writing fiction. For inspiration, I was deep-googling, and stumbled upon a YouTube video of the poet Matthew Dickman drunkenly reciting a poem with his friend in the snow somewhere, and I wondered, Where has that snow gone? Is it all the way in San Francisco yet? Water, like everything else, has a cycle, and it was a beautiful exercise to try and follow it.
