Blizzard by Sean O'Brien That saves the Gulf Stream and the Greenland Shelf.
White abolitionist of maps and calendars,
Its Lenten rigour pillowed like a sin, it means
To be the only season, falling always on itself.
To put an end to all analogy, pure cold
That proves what it need never say,
It calls us home again, beneath a drift
In which the figure and the ground collapse -
No more redundancy, no more perhaps.
Look at these attic windowsills, look in the grate -
White after white against the off-white sheets,
The wafers of a pitiless communion
That turns a wood to Mother Russia and the night
To afterlife and then to a snowblind street.
With cataracts and snow-tipped breasts
The mermaids in their brazen lingerie
Wait bravely at the fountain in the square.
Green girls, they think it is their destiny
To offer the ideal to empty air.
Forgive me that I did not understand
That you were actual, not merely art,
That your fidelity was courage, that I failed
To honour you, to recognize your pain,
To grasp that snow once fallen will not fall again.
Now it grows clear: the world is not a place
But an occasion, first of sin and then the wish
That such self-knowledge may be gratified,
While snow continues falling, till we learn
There will be neither punishment nor grace.
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