canticle

No silence was so oceanic as the kingdom

coming down in flecks of light, glinting

silver-slivers, a needlepoint, at first, and then a drift

of ash, softer, hushed, a falling whitening

 

Out of blue-black sky and wintering stars, school

and park, adjacent ballfield where I stood

to watch the air disintegrate. Ice etched its lace

intaglio across the diamond with incisive

 

Crystallinity. I was twelve, too over-awed and cold

to leave. St. Edward's bells began a muffled

angelus as the snow, all trillion trillion wings of it,

intensified. Windless, each and each and each

 

Bright tatter gentled earthward or rose deftly up,

wafting, aswirl, luminous melting wafers

upon my tongue, ghostwritten haikus the dark

erased. A car eased past, half-blind.

 

Houselights glowed from a near solar system.

I watched this joyous offspring of Canada

and Mexico, of this world's elements wed to the in-

visible, manna frosting grass and trees

 

In which I'd once found sanctuary. I was center

stillness in an infinity of blur my eyes could

freeze a blink, fixed focus in a 3-D, holographic

brainstorm, thinking. The geese above or high

 

In it were a sudden stray thought, off the flyway by sixty

miles. I heard them pass, a flock of lost souls,

faint, ooga bike horns honking. Or were they some

other sound the mind rearranged and memory

 

Embellished? I stood listening, each moist exhalation

a dissipating spirit, joining the fray. My hands

curled inside my gloves, inside my parka. Snow was

every reason made whole, piecemeal, falling.

--miguel de ozarko

Done