Now at midnight there is no true dark
but a pearly glow brighter than moonlight,
black tree limbs against a nacreous sky.

On TV, the list of cancellations grows
and the weatherman can’t restrain
his gleeful smirk as he points to the massive
storm roaring up the eastern seaboard.

Tomorrow will bring the hard labor of plows,
of shoveling walks, snowblowing a path for the oil man,
the too-familiar weariness
of all that Sisyphean work

but for these few hours there is a kind of peace
in the mostly silent streets,
our hunkering down inside,
the inability to accomplish anything
out in the white, muffled world.

The trick is to learn to like these imprisonments,
to relish them as a kind of enforced vacation,
a reminder that on this frozen coast
nature can still do in
your dinner plans, phone service,
the high school basketball game,
church suppers, bingo, AA meetings –
and give you the gift
of watching a lovely, smothering whiteness
defeat the winter dark.  


From Thank Your Lucky Stars (Moon Pie Press, 2011).
Used here with permission.