A Winter's Tale

Born in these metal tubes beneath

Abandoned cities where no seasons turn

You ask about snow: the great white

Our ancestors knew as winter in December

When men lived with the cold air high about them.

(We breathe the bottled day, take the false light

Sterile upon our eyelids) -how shall I tell you?

Snow is the naked past, snow is the dream

We had before the sky became hell's house

And these sealed rooms deep in the dying earth

Our last escape.

What is snow like?

I can't say, but your great-grandfather knows.

(That's why he weeps: we have lost the need for tears)

Ask him: he's very old, but he remembers.

It was the last night of the last year above.

I was a boy then, shaking that fleece of stars

Careless from hair and shoulders, my heels from the street

High with the packed white (snow-rabbits we called them)

I felt the kiss-quick touch upon my mouth

Tasting of acid flame and apple wine.

(The snow, my child, is million-feathered crystal

Shining as thin steel, and it makes no sound)

I heard the sirens scream, cracking the ice-case

From iron gates, shutters; heard the bells-

Those flying antelopes in frosty steeples-

Ring warning; saw the bewildered flakes

Like dazzled moths blind in a searchlight's cone

That traced the dark high flight of birds

Shaking the death-snow from their heavy wings.

The snow was shattered building-walls and blood

And flesh in jagged glass-no, no, I can't remember!

The snow I said the snow was white

Healing and quiet-white, do you hear me, white...

Come away now: his wits wander: he's very old;

He talks too much of snow-something perhaps

That never was except in the old tales

You read from books...

Like the sun, mother?

Hush, hush! Never speak that word

Or his mind may break-they'll put him in the Room

For Silence, with the one lately who shouted

That Spring was here to all the tunneled walls

And people stormed the exits to the Towers.

We came into night, the stars lost from our shoulders,

Into these obscene roots for maggot-living-

We sewer neighbors, rat to crawling rat,

To save ourselves from snow .. . Snow was white I tell you

Not the tombed light in this design for dying!

I remember the cold air, the smell of frozen apples,

Snow seeding white birth, Christmas snow, December . . .