From My Window / Loneliness Becoming Snowfall in a Storm

Lead clouds bite the moon like teeth;

surprises make children of us,

yet the moon, so perfectly predicted,

never fails to surprise,  

like the blinking crucifix of an airplane

cutting through the night.

What frightens us about darkness?

Something about bumping into things?

The painful or erotic touch before we understand?

A boy looks up⎯sensing someone staring⎯

and lights a cigarette,

wishing to remember or forget something,

(the case with all of us).

The silence is astounding,

a ball-peen hammer,

but each second I hear

is a funeral.  

Always assume nothing relates, though,

“I” and “you” just figures on a road

that continue until a stopping place is reached,

and time is up,

and roads don’t move,

so give them what they want: footsteps,

simple as rain.

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Was there loneliness?⎯Of course.

No one called it that,

but the loneliness grew strong.

It grew strong, and then it grew invisible⎯

No one sees it tickling her leg

as she lies in a disheveled bed at dawn.

No one can see the loneliness transform into snowfall,

snowfall you can look at like a galaxy

through the windshield of a car cruising the highway,  

at what seems like hyperspeed,

and wonder about the possibility of heaven

and life on distant planets,

and witness all of the uncertainty in the world

in the dying light of stars

that takes thousands of years to reach us,

gleaming, their glow diffused

by the grace and savagery of the snowfall,

snowfall you can look at like static on a television

with fingers crossed for a signal.

This is not about the drugs she takes for happiness,

because that doesn’t matter,

nor is it about the way she looks in the mirror,

nor about the mirror at all⎯

This is about the betrayal of a body,

how she waits on her womb for a sign, another chance,

as the snowfall whirls, and leaves her there, alone,

with the knowledge of it throbbing in her blood.

The clouds will remind.

The finches tweeting their remorse will remind.

Even their shattered eggs,

scattered underneath the skeletons of trees,

will remind her and disturb her sleep,

and then the tweeting will begin, again,

with a familiar regularity⎯

Like sunset smoldering the memory of a day.

Like high tide leaving pale scars on the shore.

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