All afternoon we have been waiting
for snow the weatherman promised
at noon. Unreliable though he is
we plied the pantry with potatoes and bread,
milk, and a chicken crouched in the freezer.
Now there is time for reverie
to take up larger swaths of the mind. Time
to survey the rooms, walk the floors,
confuse memory with memento, artifact
with fact—like a portrait
of some long dead family uncovered
in the attic; as silent as the grave, as unknowable
as the remnants scattered in their wake.
The man has perched a bowler on his knee, the rim
of the women’s petticoat frames the buttons
on a turned-out shoe. What particulars
quantify them now? Here—in suburbia—
among the old houses made new, the mouth
of every garage tight-lipped, the amorphous
whistle from the train tracks and the occasional car
that guns it up the street. I’ve written this poem before;
the little soul encapsulated in her little hut.
I am learning to live again
with unstable elements; the ghostly motion
of a garden swing, the distant whirr
of wheels and engine, an ambulance blaring
across the valley floor. Here, in the pre-snow silence,
there is time to let slip the juxtaposition of now
and then, house and street, portrait and memory.
Nothing but time to wait
for the texture of twilight to appear
on the kitchen wall, a flutter of white
to float across the face of a window. Now
I will silence the radio, pull out the knife
by its tail and prepare to cleave flesh
from bone, question from action,
time from the stillness of relics.