A strange year
Summer came, as usual, spreading hope
across the town. It melted us each year, the sun
- a stiff, self-conscious people as we were -
we’d wait for it to come before we’d dare
to undress our fears. Too nervous otherwise,
we depended on a shot of that
seasonal amnesia to forget
the coming winter, the trailing tracks
of light-less days and all-dark thoughts
wherein life would soon be forced,
one snowstorm at at time.
Yet, when wintertime arrived, snow was
a symbol, only thought, a weather report
metaphor. Looking up that year, we saw
no trace of it at all: it just didn’t fall.
Instead, the skies just gave us
silence. Imagine, that silence of sleep,
those four cold months of muffled, snow-up life
but without the snow: no blocked-up roads,
no shoveling, no almost-deadly accidents.
Not even any freezing hands.
Oh, and all that silence! So much silence you could
wallow in it, build igloos of it, throw it, chew it,
make angels in it: so much silence
you could freeze to death in it.
But no one froze that year; there was too much movement.
The streets were bare at first, but soon we started
using them: we’d meet, we met to move; sometimes,
we met just to prove that we could,
that we could shape the streets we’d built.
Together, we would sit and talk, and think, and ask
why the snow was missing; why this silence had arrived,
what we thought it meant, and whether it would last.
But most of all, we’d sit in silence,
just listening. We’d meet to listen in, even though
on what I’m still wondering.
Those who were young then often say
that it was the sound of something new,
of something being made.
The older ones, well, they used to say
that they thought it was something
very, very old, slowly emerging again.
