What I’m saying is, this isn’t the right kind of snow.
Sure the anchors call it treacherous
but I’ve met it down dark alleys all my life. No,
snow should always be, as kids have it, a miracle
of whiteness at the pane, flakes large enough
to plink at the glass like a moth or a fingernail
and dry out slow enough to watch drying out
on the clothing of the one you love. Forget
the ice-box favoured in the emergency room,
it’s snow like this a heart comes bedded in.
And forget those now useless runways;
planes in mid-air grow sensitive,
the riveted metal of their wings goosepimples
as they go swooping through two kinds of white.
The difference between snow and water is
the difference between dialectic and a kiss,
between a birth certificate and spare change.
This much you already know. What you don’t know
is snow, is slanted crystals
the halo round a sodium lamp
can’t bear without shuddering.
While credit shifts and melts and hardens
and is lost, as the great man says,
as water is in water, his words are merely
so many thought-bubbles made visible
as we breathe in a snowy climate:
white shapes of breath that want, like the smoke
from a cigarette, or the super-slow-mo ripples
of a cube of gelatine bounced off tile, to be
the drapes and folds of statuary. The bare
ruined choir, the coloured glass is stained
to a white radiance and goes
without remainder into water, a new beginning;
yet the snow we ball and build
into forts we’ll live in when all grown up
wants to change, always, into a white beard.
