Words Written on a Snowy Evening

Drawing by Peter Rippon

The quality of suffering

Is not strained in the least

But falls in a pristine

Blanket of snow along

The banks of Weesuck Creek

I hear it too in the sound

Of the turbid waters

Churning deep underneath

The Bay Avenue dock

Where the ice also clings

To the pilings' tops 

Growing older

It gets harder

To hold reality’s strands

Separate and apart

As the spectrum of light

Keeps shifting about

But tonight I see it clearly

In the strange luminosity

Of this snowy evening

In the jaundiced glare

Of the streetlight

As it spreads across

Notebook’s page

And plashes onto 

The snow banks

Just below