The Garbage Eater: Poems

The Snow Day

70 TheSnowDay Night raged around us, cruel and furious while we slept, and finally empty, it retreated inward, as if cloistered, to surrender everything it wasn’t: the neighborhood like one unified snowfield in the morning calm and our son storming through the bedroom, quick to bet me a donut, over my paper, he could spend all day outside. This guy’s no dummy, doubling his chances through kids’ logic, heart set on the outdoors and the donut. And from our perch at the corner of the bathroom window you and I see this three-foot warrior of last night’s nor’easter once again draw the toy guns of his hands, loaded with conviction, to pelt the line of powder he’s sent skyward. Marshmallow in a snowsuit, insulated madman, he is pure soul out there, ignorant of all worlds except the one primitive kingdom he’s created. He removes his ski mask and dumps snow on his own head. Our other one enters, recently teenaged, says we’re stupid for standing on the toilet, and peers skeptically toward the yard. “You’d think this was the best day of his life,” she says, sneering. Her lanky gait reminds me of us, our awkward latchkey days before the term was demographic. It’s the way her life becomes less ecstatic—clothes are more important, haircuts start to matter—the child leaves her for good. Cold’s cold: she no longer likes the weather. 71 So how could she find that joy, our older girl, who’s worrying about what clubs to join at the school fair? Our younger’s throwing snowballs at the car. He moves like the first black streak of tempera, careless on a prairie of canvas, or a lone eighth note stalled rebelliously above the scale, one beat remote from the motif, and he plays, indifferent, rich, distant from the riches, running in crazed figure eights for hours and going nowhere. ...