Some of this comes from an older poem that sort of petered out unsatisfactorily. I decided it needed a second person and a touch of mortality.
Cold Snap
All night as we lay sleeping snow came down,
the way time accumulates invisibly until
one morning these are the faces in our mirror.
What plans we might have had for the day –
poof. Nothing is moving from here to town,
nothing moving among white-freighted trees.
Only snow is moving, snow steadily falling,
flowing into drifts like waves breaking on
the white beach of a slow-motion ocean.
The cedars harbor black-capped chickadees
fluffed up twice their size against the cold,
beaks tucked under wings white with snow.
The old farmhouse creaks in the draft. I feel
it in my bones, despite a well-worn cardigan.
I feel it in my heart, despite your presence.
But it is just the inner echo of the weather,
a cold snap of the mind, the brevity of the day
laid alongside the bitter length of night.
Cold and dark get no easier to bear with age,
reminiscent as they are of that dreaded end
when winters come and winters go without us.
