8 November 2011

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 8

It is not abnormal for snow to fall

at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday in early

November.  Though normally I

might miss it, being asleep or

in front of a glowing screen or

the crumpled pages of a book,

but tonight I walk across a

glinting street to a car covered

in a thin sheen of the softest dust,

the very icon of ephemera.

It is not exactly ironic that I

had been thinking hours earlier

that the heat that causes ice to 

melt a glass of middling scotch

actually dissipates as it does its job,

which is the same process  that causes

my beard, now covered with snow,

to gradually haul in the particles of

atmosphere deigning to light upon it.

As there is also nothing abnormal about death,

 persistence, or  the recapitulation of lost love 

we call believing in ghosts. It doesn't take much 

to inspire memory to create a vision. To see 

what was and isn't all at once, a rainbow, 

 a halo, or the snowy angel dancing in the 

star-like drift of flakes in headlight shine.

There is no paranormal, only perspective,

 faith, & the sleight of mind that fools

when need & imagination coincide 

with the atmospheric tricks of pressure change, 

cold front, & the tilting spin of mother Earth.