Annual Awards

Snow Whippets

                             Suddenly afternoon turned the color of slate.
Some first few snowflakes trembled down
clots on the face of the street.
         The impermanence of my life
came into my mind. I was sick with the news.

                            I sat in the cafe as if I was a passenger
at the glass, watching rain, its filigree,
stumble along the pavement. Vladimir (to no one,
a kind of notation). Smoke resembling dry ice
rose from the grates, debris steaming.
Visor-dipped pedestrians harried
to their platforms, umbrellas
inverted.

                            Evening arrived, taking on the color
of its own imminence. I felt myself
to be hurtling past.

When, before, I found myself, as if without passport
in the Russia I love, still I felt less trepidation
than I did at The Mayfair Millennium Hotel,
in London, a citizen,
on the verge of being deported.

         I scanned faces for someone to love. But, faces
of the passengers were impassive. You were not among them,
you whom I love.
         It is not only that for which I cried out.

                                              Gradually, from the pane,
I saw all that I knew pass before me, a pageant,
their sonorities muffled,
as snow whippets sleeked past the drift.
         I felt I would go into the stile of snow,
that they had drawn me to an attenuated pitch,
that they had elongated me,
that dogs are hungerers,
that I could not make a coat of their pelts,
that I would be devoured
by the musicality of their tongues.