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Birds hunting food,
flocks in the air, wheel
above the metal Dumpster.
Nothing there. Pigeons
plump in drifts. The woman
who stirs the Dumpster
abandons her bent cart.
A white veil ripples
across the buildings.
A snow plow, scrawny
as an old man's neck,
like a squawking chicken,
jerks its yellow eye
in the shrouded parking lot.
Main Street traffic stops.
Power lines sag.
Power goes out.
From the dark window,
flashing red lights,
sirens passing slow
through the diaphanous
scarves of blowing crystals.
The shudder of spumes,
sprays of fine ice
against the building.
It blows under the main door,
fills up the entrance
to the first step
to the first floor.
A long arm of snow stretches
along the basement hall,
along the basement apartments
where the retired women
living on Social Security
are sitting smoking
in front of their dark TVs.
Holding your breath,
you stand at the window.
The phone is dead.
Snow hisses against the glass.
You shiver and feel your way
in the dark. At last the matches.
You waver with lit candle
to the pit of your bed and
like a hibernating animal,
unconscious, crawl in to safety.
Mindless, you sleep as you
did on your mother's breast.
Until the sun streams in
as through a cathedral window,
as if you are blessed after a flogging.
Not a bird in sight, not a sound.
Not a Thai has come out.
Their blinds pulled down,
thick snow on their metal steps,
mounded without tracks.
Their timed lives,
day shift and night shift,
their exchange of beds,
some leaving, some entering,
interrupted.
Only imagined sacks of rice
behind the now darkened window,
the window around the corner
in the Thai Recreation Restaurant
and Pool Hall. Only silence
like a glitch, like a pause
in abnormal breathing;
and the large, comfortable
casket of the snow.
Ruth Stone
"Blizzard" appears in In The Dark,
Coppercanyon Press, 2004
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