It is the season when everyone wishes 
for everything, for spring to come, for skies
to clear, but the snow, the snow
falls and falls like angels’ kisses,
each symmetrically unique
sometimes kissing themselves
as they fall
 
over shipyards, wharves, cities’ abandoned
housing projects, factories and chemical
dumps snow falls, it falls over the street sleepers 
curled in the cold, it blows into the doorways 
of closed shops, into viaducts, over steam grates, 
and out into the country it blows
over ditches, manure mounds, feedlots.
 
The snow blows and blows over the half-eaten
carrion left by frightened animals; it snows
over every sore of earth as if to bury it all 
with cold dispassion; each flake an envoy
of belief in a universe of invisible snowfalls,
even glaciers shudder, themselves giant erasures,
amid the icy angels’ perfectly cold kisses.