Gregory Djanikian: After the First Snow
As if in a dream,
you suddenly find yourself walking
in a still country
of snow and moon and trees,
cold and uncomfortable,
blindly pushing
as if your life depended on it
to shelter somewhere on the far side of a field,
or to a place half-conceived,
or perhaps forgotten,
and you find yourself looking down, focusing
on nothing
but the hypnotic, even movements of your stride
and the snow-covered boots
that fall on nothing but snow,
and as you chart your next
turn, you begin to realize that only
your movement
distinguishes you
from this ambush of stillness,
the arrangement of parts, each still
in itself, uncommunicative,
the collapse of motion,
relativity, proportion, order,
and as the mind abandons
the grace and fluidity of motion,
your movements become irregular
and unattractive,
and you begin to stiffen, grow tired,
and gradually,
as you feel your own weight
tottering
above your legs, you begin
to submit, and before the last turn,
near a cluster of bare, empty-headed
trees, stop,
and let all resistance pass out of you,
and as your mind stretches toward that expanse
from where you could have come,
the snow begins to shape itself around you
and you become a part of the whiteness
and the cluster
yet wholly distinct and still
as if in a dream,
as if you had never seen this place
of snow, of moon, of trees, here
as though nothing were yours,
not even
the slight sounds
of your breathing.
