snowfall

I didn’t watch the snow falling.
I knew the forecast,
wished I could muster the child’s delight
to watch falling snow,
but I could not be bothered;
or so I told myself.

There is something sinister
about falling snow,
as it whitens the black asphalt streets
fills them with a silence like death,
smoothes all creases,
gradually erases cracks and contours.

Forgive me, it’s my age, my generation,
but I think of our cold war era nightmares,
thermonuclear annihilation,
the flash of reason sublimated into madness:
it is too like the imagined fall of ash
the ash of all things transmuted to powder.

So instead I emerged afterward from my basement room
to see a new white world,
a cold white blanket on a cold earth;
this ineluctable silence,
this quiet, this white patience:
the peace at the end of things.