a breathless disturbance

Staring out my window at the whitening world around me,
I get lost in thoughts of beauty,
how amazing is the pristine perfection
of the carefully sculpted, flower-petaled flakes
as they layer
one
on
top of
the other
to blanket my world.

How divine it is that no footprints walk the
smooth waves of snow drifts that
roll in and out of this house's shores!
How divine that nothing interrupts my reverie,
encouraging me to indulge in this fantasy of solitude!


Solitude, though?
I think this is what they call
Passivity.

The point is not
to sit behind the thin pane of glass,
catching my breath
again and again in wonder.
The point is not
to gaze at the world
like a television screen
like a painting
like a statue
like a god,
admiring its curvaceous jagged edges,
saying this is me and
this is not me,
like a lecherous ogler of fine wares.


The point
my friend
is to become part
of the beauty
all around.
The point
is to unabashedly feel
the absence of
feeling in my nose and chin,
the tingling that
weighs on my extremities
as they shiver
beneath layers of
natural and synthetic fibers.
The point
is to disturb the
perfectly formed clumps of
ice on the tree branches
into humanly formed snowballs
and to launch them into the
air so that they meet,
head-on with the
sky-given drops, before
giving into gravity
and once again
joining
the blue-tinged
sea of glass.

***


"Dare I disturb the universe?"
he asked, breathlessly,
his eyes darting
back and forth with
childhood excitement.
"Yes," said he,
regaining composure, "yes, I think I will."
Eagerly,
he strapped on his boots,
opened his door, and
jumped off the front step
to go and play
with the
swirling
winds of change.