Snowstorm In My Soul: A Poem

Snow begins in the margins—
not outside the window (though yes,
Massachusetts is white with it,
and the roofs look like folded letters),
but here—behind the ribs,
in the soft library where the pulse keeps
its banned books.

I have known this weather before.

It drifts in without apology,
like a line half-remembered from A writer whose name time forgot—
a green fuse burning under frost,
sap rising through a wintered branch,
the body insisting on bloom
while the sky insists on ash.

O my heart, you are a harbor of stalled ferries,
their ropes iced stiff,
their captains dreaming of June.

Yet also—
I want to run down Princeton Street without a coat,
buy Weed from a man who doesn’t care about eternity,
tell a stranger in a café that the sugar tastes like
childhood and train smoke and first chords on a borrowed guitar—
because that is how I survive this:
by loving the cashier,
the receipt,
the accidental radio song
that turns the slush to diamonds for three minutes.

Snowstorm in my soul—
you are not death,
not even sorrow.

You are accumulation.

Flake by flake,
memory by memory—
the red suitcase in the corner labeled in a father’s hand,
the practice room echoing with a drummer’s laugh,
a Zoom window flickering with possibility
while the world outside howls white—

All of it falling.

All of it bright.

If I stand still long enough
I can hear the storm composing itself—
a cathedral made of breath and static,
each thought a small cathedral bell.

And I am not buried.

I am becoming landscape—
hill and hollow,
track and drift,
footprint filling even as it is made.

O wintered heart,
be extravagant.

Let the snow write through you.