At night you clear a space on the railing for new snow to fall.
You have a bent for reckoning, and you’re patient:
you watch, you wait, then you measure. Soon flakes
swarm under the porch light like bees settling: bees of light
in a hive of light. They’ve blown from the swollen
fields of the sky. Now they want to embrace everything.
In the yard the next morning, there are no longer
any hard edges, only curved, gravid shapes.
With one hand you sink your coffee mug into the white
arm of the railing. With the other you insert the ruler: four
and one quarter inches. You pick up your coffee mug
and step back into the kitchen where your lover
is pushing her hair from her face. You realize all this time
you’ve been hoping she would wake, and now she has.
