THE river blackens in a frame of snow.
1 The air is one commotion of more snow falling.
I walk into a day like Christmas cards,
New England winter meeting memory
Snow scene by snow scene to bring back to touch
Wet snowballs on wet mittens, cheeks numb and fired
With all the boisterous cold and noise of growing
Amid the serious businesses of throwing
A snowball faster, further, and-smack
Between the earmuffs and the Mackinaw collar
Precisely down McGinty’s Irish neck.
I count the snowfall clinging to my sleeves
And think how we used to run, mouths up and open,
To snap a snowflake clean out of the air
That moved here long ago down years of growing
Since last I wore white piping on my ears,
Or carried a gauze shingle on each eye,
Or felt so grateful for my body’s heat
Against the winter that could swallow it.
We were mad, busy, imagined, and already
Tired of fights in the schoolyard and after school:
McGinty’s blood on my knuckles, mine on his,
And our few memorized obscenities
Waiting for any meeting to hate each other.
We weren’t the nicest kids in school,
We smoked too early, swore too well,
And didn’t always tip our hats to ladies.
But the snow knew us, we two savages
Who fought the winter back and trampled it.
I think there was too much motion of the air,
Too many patterns falling from the sky
Like snow, to numb and make us loud.
Until we lost a way and found a way.
The strangeness is this echo of returning,
This walking down the same streets where we were
To touch ourselves upon the interim
Between two winters, years and names apart,
And feel ourselves grow secret like the river,
Deepening in the white frame of a thought,
Learning that what we left for lost, was not.
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