Snowed In

Spied me standing here, unaware of those precious

neologisms that your baby clutches like you do handrails

bound to a flimsy wall that has seen decades of bug-eyed

raven-ladies perched in frightful circumstances not unlike

your own, but perhaps with a new nurse, less Southern,

or perhaps in a dimmer flicker of those decades-old lights

that promised to shine until your next coming. Welcome,

in an eyeshot. Let it bounce off you like the migrants poisoned

by their trade or the children with crazy stares that flick over me,

cast off of them and onto the dirty ground littered with such stares

not unlike your own, locked in the timeless solemnity of fluorescence

that grasps you, tethers you to your son. Your son, the coldest gentleman

that was snowed like a tractor in between the altitude dysbarism of society

and the culminating peaks of cigarette butts that offer a single shake before

that wintered pasttime descends like death that is only so in snow globes,

auto accidents, that last breath before your only engine surrenders to entropy:

cold, frozen entropy is your only friend, dear. You must look at me with 10,000

kaleidoscopic perspectives from those dark lenses that you bear with the same

ease as I might a stethoscope, a penlight, and a splash of blood

borrowed, not to be returned, from your son, acquiescent

to those same turbulent flows that surround all of us, blessed and cursed with life.

When you spot me again, nothing will be different. Neither of us will learn

what it is exactly that smoke takes from the air, from the fire, though I will

offer you an association with pneumonia. Even if neither of us can escape

this moment because we choose to look-on, bug-eyed, let this candle be

our only record that there was never a path to stray from except for his:

a freshly plowed impasse.