Nestled quietly in my small town home I read,
And listen to the wind mourn.
Outside my close walls brews and swirls a storm
as blinding as the cloth over a hostage’s eyes.
I’ve turned the page by the time I hear the knock on my window,
Sweet and subtle and silencing.
I left my chair, stained and falling apart in its old age,
And I opened the window.
Nothing stood outside it in the waves and waves of snow,
It fell cold on my exposed skin.
I watched closer for a moment longer, seeking the blurred outline from my mind,
But people dissolve like that.
I close the window, and return to my chair,
The winter outside swallows any hope for a visit today,
And I would like to stand in the midsts of that wind and throw my hands out;
I would like to stop it.
I would like to stop the howling mourn whipping through the trees, and the cold, and the blindness.
I would like to stop the dissolve.
I would like to stop the loss of people, and I don’t want to watch them fade.
I want to tell the winds to stop moving, hold them tight to me instead
Of letting them blow away each blurred outline.
But I cannot. I hear the baby crying in the next room.
I wonder where people go when they dissolve, and I wonder--no. That is not me.
I stand from the chair, stained with spilt coffee and torn from drunken nights,
My book will have to wait,
But it has fallen to the floor anyhow and I’ve now lost my page.
I walk towards those plaintive cries, that helpless state,
And I dissolve with each thud of my socked feet.
Until my hallway is no hallway.
And I don’t feel the piled up snow beneath me.
And I hear the baby crying still,
But it does not matter,
I cannot find it in these blinding sheets I’m bound in.