Epektasis

I wanted snow
(that old absolution).

Snow is what happens
when the world edits itself down
to one color.

I wanted to be the kind of person
who would still answer yes
without the clause,
without the pause in the throat
that knows what comes after.

Instead the day arrives marked up.
A weather system with footnotes.
A name that insists on being spoken.
I do not speak it.

Ice.
Which is not snow but snow
that has remembered something.

The air has the authority
of a physician.
It checks me.
It knows my old fractures
better than I do.

I am horizontal.
The blanket vibrates faintly
like a domestic animal.
Warmth arrives by wire.

Outside, the ground
has revoked trust.
Everything leans on everything else
and calls it standing.

I will have to go.
There is a place
that expects my body in it.

This will require shoes—
a working relationship with gravity,
the negotiation known as walking.

Each step performs an inquiry—
will you hold.

The body answers first.
It remembers injuries
as if they were myths—
over, but not finished.

Fear used to come from afar—
a weather front.
Now it lives locally.
Below the waist.
In the interval
between lift and land.

Let the day let me through
without commentary.
Without citing my materials.

I imagine a device
that relocates me intact
from bed to obligation
without passing through weather.

No wet hems.
No proof.

This is what astonishment has become:
to arrive
and not be altered.

Snow may keep its beauty.
I am busy attempting
the more difficult crossing—
a morning
that does not remind me
what I am made of.