Flaked

I had good reason to be annoyed, even a little angry

When you decided to add winter to my list of reasons to despair

You made the air an adversary and the improperly sealed windows

Spilled jagged, chilling insults into my dinner and the novel

I kept starting to read again for the first of many times

Everyone shrank into portable shells of grim determination

Walking to work became a quest for dandruffed pioneers

The subway station turned to a salon

Full of loud, deranged arguments

Between the unhoused and the invisible crowds inside themselves

No thinking, feeling body could begrudge them

Their stark, stained, stinking refuge from the cold

I resented you and cursed you quietly and furtively

Calculating the dimensions of your tire-changing life

Knowing that whatever else you are, you are mortal

The sun will best you soon and you will retreat into the margins

Of grumbling, incredulous memory

You are everything that is here now, though

Only you can find the edge of the wind and hone it

Your fingerprints and cruel perfume are ubiquitous

Salt and sand cover the streets as if they have been seasoned

Do you intend to cook and eat our trampled thoroughfares?

The trouble is that, much as I would like to, I can’t hate you

Even the blind can sense your pale majesty on their cheeks

Snow sanctifies the filthiest precincts of this implausible city

Atwood lamented that it was a mistake to build this far north

More of her lyrical legislation should be acknowledged

Would she cease to be a poet if it were?

Frost makes all glass a lost diary

Of the broken romance between water, cold and time

You have made each movement outside shelter costly

And thus, increased each one’s worth like a stolen masterpiece

The gurus insist that all we need do to taste transcendence

Is carefully attend to the slow music of our breath

You frigid harlot, how you mock their tranquil wisdom!

Not only can I attend to my breath, I can see my neighbors’

As we all trudge through the streets that you will not permit to thaw

Each footfall sounds like the tooth of a frost giant worrying

The bones of some fool sure that he could map the blank blizzard

Why did you arrest the rain?

What crime did it commit?

Are the flakes nostalgic for the time when they were drops?

Look how they cover bored parking lots with virginal pallor

They excite and scold at once like blank and waiting pages

Animals and children do not know that writing can be blocked

They writhe and shout their illiterate sagas into you

Years steal the mad liberty that lets them write like that

This is the icy secret you have made intelligible

The shocking gift that wrests love for you from frostbitten hearts:

A drop thinks it will always laugh with limpid, liquid languor

It does not understand itself, nor does it feel the need

Taught to crystallize by your cruel crash course

Suddenly sufficiently solid to join a bank

It does not think to itself: “What have I become? What was I?”

Death is not something that the dead remember enduring

Alteration so complete must take the whole mind with it

The familiar logic of being and knowing reconfigured

Water and snow do not simply speak distinct languages

Once you are a flake, that must become all you have ever been

Winter, you have shown me death in flash frozen attire

No longer can I fear or dread what means I’m something else