It began to snow as I left the city, muffling the London drear
of fogged windowpanes, blurred rouge-cheeked stoplights -
the flakes falling like melted diamonds down spines.
The silk-sheathed countryside that swallowed my first footsteps
clutched my mother close;
together, they perched at the kitchen table, hands clasped like a locket.
Her face was china-pale in the unquiet dusk,
afternoon bruised to mottled eggplant,
the crawling-already baby murmuring at her breast
as she sliced the silence as smoothly as butter,
telling me again of the deception of first snow: how simple the smothering
by its muslin blanket - he now held in the belly of the whale, its enveloping breast -
’til nightfall numbed his coal thoughts.
Hours would pass before the men came, blue-clad and stony,
to affirm what she had already surmised.
But instead, I thought of him by the low beam of lamplight. He had been smuggled
into the oily bilge of a cargo ship, bound for a faraway island of pirate reign.
Or, perhaps, aboard the last car of the departing circus,
stowed among the elephants, their hulking heads lowered as they dozed.
In another crevice of my mind, he lazed upon a glacier
floating across the chilled Atlantic at twilight.
I ignored all I knew now of my father, devoured by the empty night.