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Monday Meditations
This little prosey poem is from my new book, Hysterian. It first appeared in Banyan Review. The poem came along after a morning spent daydreaming while watching out the window at a hypnotic winter blizzard.
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SNOW BEASTS
The snow started just after dusk. Someone was scattering
armloads of silver glitter over the edges of clouds, and it
floated down into the streetlight glow. She tightroped along
the curb, dressed only in a paisley nightgown and red wool mittens.
She danced to the middle of the street and spun, head back,
tongue out, until she was a kaleidoscope of textures and colors,
red hands dusted with diamonds. Snow fell through the night.
She had gone back in for her blue coat and boots, and now
she was sitting atop a drift that had sculpted itself against the trunk
of an Ash next door. She was poised on the crest of the drift, frozen
blue dolphin on a crushed-ice wave, leaning back to look up at the
falling tinsel in the moonlight. She was half hidden in snow-speckled
light and the tree’s moon shadows. I could hear her singing.
I watched her from my living room window, wrapped in a shawl,
cat stalking the sofa back, with all the lights off. She was like
a dream of softly stirring color, a glorious painting unfolding itself
on the white canvas of snow’s static. I rested my tired head
on the back of the sofa, wanted to be her, tried not to blink.
The cat kneaded my thigh, circled and curled in. The wind
picked up, orchestra for her lullaby. The snow stopped
four days later. Our flat street had turned wild countryside
of white hills and deep valleys. The whole street busied itself
digging out from under the drifts, moving muscles stiff
from too much sleep. I watched the neighbors’ houses for her,
decided she’d been a snow vision brought on by faltering eyes
or tricks of winter light. I felt a hollow in my chest where I kept
an ache for her. I may have wept. Weeks later, in the grey
slush of melting, a spring squirrel spotted paisley and dug.
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