Watching Snow

Watching snow fall and blow outside the window is a winter pleasure — standing in the kitchen while coffee brews, while bagels brown. There’s something soothing in the constant downward flow like bathing in fast water, in a world obscured as by fog off the river.

Watching Snow

I watch snow falling, filling in tracks
of deer, rabbits, and mice that ran
about the yard as I lay sleeping.

Soon it will be as if they had never been,
the way waking thoughts blur and then
dissolve the convolutions of dreams.

The tale told by printed wings where
the frantic mouse tracks end is blurring 
away into the undifferentiated Tao of snow.

The face of an old friend who had to tell
me something so urgently is blurring away
into the undifferentiated Tao of his passing.

It all comes down like snow: dreams, lives,
deaths, tales, fears, the leaping of the deer,
the stillness of the night — all fading into white.

Note: unpublished draft