couple casually strolls past my window, both of them wearing flannel pajama onesies, the guy's all crayola blue with silver snowflakes, the woman's black and pasted with alien faces. just outside the glass i see stoic palms filled with crystal heaps. this morning i heard neither song nor caw in this much quieter city. we wrap ourselves to venture out & receive this dazzling white gift, reluctantly unwrapped. i take my lens into the limb maze to let my gaze penetrate its hushed circle. inside at the table in front of me, i watch a middle-aged father, dressed all in black, train a camera on his little boy, sipping a hot chocolate across the table, who tilts his cute, knit hatted head from side to side, offering angles of sweetness. i read recently that men aren't supposed to take selfies, but i feel the need to document my presence, if only to prove i exist to myself, as vast swathes of my time here have roamed free from lens, never captured, as if my youth had been an unidentified species whose existence was never suspected by science and was only recently discovered. i wonder where the birds go when it snows, i think, when i finally see the day's first crow. i watch a family pull their child on a makeshift sled and remember when i was a boy i used to go sledding in an old graveyard, screaming past those tilted stones whose names & dates were slowly, inexorably made illegible with each passing storm.
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