The Snow Squalls

a new poem

The snow squalls carry their own lack of light.
Time after time, they crawl into the clear
brilliance of November skies
and empty over the constantly changing bay.

The breakwall is barely an impediment pointing
into the looming icy brew. It only adds perspective
to the circus of this cold new world. The water leaps over it
as the last reds, oranges and golds spin out 

over inland waters, all the roads that point away. Again
and again, the big lake disappears as intermittent blizzards 
swallow the shore. An alien dimness descends.
We are lost and thrilled

at the same time, think: this must be 
what winter is! How its first fast cloak comes, how it stays,
that storied heavy snow enlightening the constant advance 
and retreat of a single solstice day: dark time dark streets 

dark feasts. But just as sudden, through the haze 
of another white haboob, the sun crashes through,
melts what has just fallen. If only living could promise 
such fleet delivery from darkness, from the dangers 

of disappearance into draperies of the north wind!
How it sweeps up warmth from the water
and makes these recurrent swirling storms
a phantasm of horizon no horizon then horizon 

once more, busted and thrown out into light
against irrevocably roving mounds of clouds. Oh
I give in to the day, to the departure of the remains
of the warmer Fall full of a steady magnificence, 

the flaming spectrum lighting the trees. The hills 
across the water, still orange with remnants of Autumn,
are hazed with silver and white and then
disappear again. We see nothing, blinded by snow

going our ways through these sudden revelations that sweep
over us and then are gone again into the distance
beyond the lake’s lavender wash and white-rocked waves.
We hardly recognize home, but we travel on

in spite of, perhaps through, the volatile variances 
of every day, in spite of our own wish to merely observe 
and dream such explosions and implosions, the small calms, 
the bluster and bloom of these November days.