March in Syracuse

Sarah Harwell

First published in Salt Hill 30 (2013).

The snow is late this year, the snow is never coming,
the snow is a dream we dream
in the late afternoon when the twilight lights
the somber trees, when the twilight
is tense with its fast lights.

It is only as winter turns to spring that snow comes.
The people have wandered indoors to watch the sky flick snow
from the snow colored clouds, to watch as the dense green
of the strangely warm ground turns white, to watch
the turning of the edges and careful constructs
of veins and bark into shapes of whiteness
and the world is suffused and sufficient.

Finally we relax,
one world of one color
which is no color.

Inside all is the same. The people, the warm people
who are happy because they are warm
but who are sad for various, constructed reasons, sad and busy,
are drawn to the windows. As they put their faces
to the transparency radiating cold and clear,
a fallen tree trunk no, five of them
motionless on the ground outside their houses—
it is a city neighborhood, a neighborhood of beer cans and plastic—
the trunks move a little, unfolding into five bodies,
one shakes its head, then lifts to sniff the air and
finding the snow to be a good smell, a perfect smell,
settles back down into perfectly still again.

It has been a strange winter. Living things holding
themselves too still, and dead things shaking their heads.
Only in the snow the world comes under some enchantment
and though we hold onto the edges of our difference
which mean so much to us,
it is a relief when the snow comes, it is a relief to watch
what’s living stay as still as coldness, turn to snow.

The people indoors shake their various heads.
Something has happened. Inside them sadness moves
like skittish deer living in places they don’t belong,
the tinseled city where sirens wail against
soft and tender ears.
When the trees walk away the deer bend their knees like humans
who are tired. They leave a patch of green the shape of their bodies.
All the people in the houses are now involved
in their own involvements. There is much to see
and misunderstand. In an hour the green is covered
and the snow keeps falling. Nothing can keep it out,
this sky like a gate to heaven if heaven existed
elsewhere.

Sarah Harwell is the author of the collection Sit Down Traveler (2012) and, with Courtney Queeney and Farah Marklevits, Three New Poets (2006). She teaches at Syracuse University and lives in Syracuse, New York.