The World Unseen
Sir Thomas Browne believed in his own salvation
as he believed in Constantinople,
where he had never been. Today,
my street is a Constantinople
of snow.
As though I’d failed to pay my bill,
the snow has shut off all connections.
Gone is the shape the world offers me–
the hiss of distant, rustle of nearby
leaves, the hammer’s crack
rebounding off successive roofs, lilac
scent that swells and then dopplers away.
Instead I have silence, cold,
the muffled uninformative
probing of my cane, and now
the scrape scrape, of a snow-shovel.
Hello, I say.
Nothing. The lift and toss,
the powder’s diffuse arc, must be inferred;
Excuse me, I call.
No response.
If the shoveler does not exist, it will
be necessary to invent him.
This must be how the dead persist,
bundled in their shrouds
of static, grasping at fragments,
trying to get the attention of a stranger.
| Roy White |
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