Snowflakes
: Arafat Kazi

You were the winter’s tiniest snowflake,
giving grace to those wretched streets
like a goddess, or an angel, or like the wind,
a force of nature
dancing on the head of a pin.
Maybe it was a sin,
choking back my cigarette, ignoring the din
of bellowing taxicabs, and the gin
in my faltering stomach. Feeling the sleet
fall on me, fall on you, fall on everyone else,
for the world is not alone—
when you and I meet.

Maybe there was a rainbow
from that story Kermit tells.
I wouldn’t know, I was wondering.
Floundering. (Hoping I was a poet, pondering.)
When all the time you were spinning,
weaving new patterns, beginnings
of stories that I would have hoped to share.
But I, what of me? I wasn’t there
to know of much, or of any
of this worldly miscellany.
For you see, I was too busy hearing bells.

Like an endless circle you kept on spinning.
I, speaking loudly in my curious, half-singing
quasi-humorous falsetto.
It was my wilderness Paradise,
my ethereal, earthly Paradise,
my concrete, celestial Paradise,
which I couldn’t always indulge in.

Those stolen moments were truly few
that I could open my heart to talk to you.

When seconds would freeze and time wait by—
a good friend, Time, never asking “Why?”,
just content to watch me summon up the guts to try
and choose an eternity, an instant
when I would use the moment, an excuse
(with a sorry look and a sigh)
to cough, hold back, try my hopeless hand at divulging,
knowing always you’d refuse.

I was refraining the bursting emotion, straining
in my secret heart, bulging.
And you, my dear
with your grace so divinely winning,
made me choke back a tear
when you were dancing silently, warm in the melting snows.

And like you, and like the first falling snowflake,
that which was fleetingly once so close
is now in the past and distant.
The snowflakes have melted.
I couldn’t have, if I had tried, helped it.
My memories of that morning are too holy and resistant.
You are there, my unrequiting female,
to talk on the phone and to send replies to emails,
perhaps to feel uncomfortable
if I’m being too persistent.

Maybe another time, another place, possibly a different year,
when there’s a waltz in the sky.
In an indescribably short blink of an eye—
a colorful haze, a fuzzy langolier,
an indefinitely long moment in time,
I’ll be looking out my window, and I’ll notice that it snows.
I’ll go out to get my cigarettes, trudging and dreary,
not alone but without your dance
(where you spun round and around, like a gossamer fairy)
and thus, unutterably weary,
I’ll be walking in some kind of trance.
Feeling my communally wistful despair,
and sometimes remembering the snowflakes
trapped and glistening in your hair.