Yes, the newspapers were right:  snow was general all over Ireland.
            —James Joyce, "The Dead"
 
I don't need a newspaper or web-page radar map
to know what lifting my shade can tell me
this muffled morning, the streets erased overnight,
with phone poles and Stop signs rising from 
the general blur like fence posts in a flood,
and it is a flood, this roil of cloudy expanse
that has closed middle schools, shut down interstates,
and already spread across the map in my mind,
every rest stop, back yard and bean field from here
to Albany, New York, falling on Pizza Huts
in Cleveland, wiping out the parking lot
of a hospital in Erie, covering ice shanties
on Lake Onondaga, drifting doors shut
in a trailer park near Binghamton where 
my old friend Juan lives, rising bleary-eyed 
from frantic dreams and one too many bourbons 
last night to peek out the little porthole-sized window
and watch snow still falling, falling across
triumph and loss equally, falling without fuss
as it did thirty-five years ago high
above the river in New Hampshire, where 
we stole dinner trays from the dining hall
and headed out to the golf course at midnight
in the swirl and gust of it, the same storm
truly, as falls down the years now, burying
all the hard words, all the frigid miles
that separated us for good half a lifetime ago,
Juan and I, who once every winter at least
will still go careening wildly down
the long sloping fairway of the fourth hole,
shouting shit to the sky and to each other,
both of us well out of control and spinning
deliriously as the flakes spin and descend
out of the darkness, healing every pothole,
every divot and boot print that defaces
the clean lawn down which we plunge,
with no other thought but the glad tug
of gravity, and no other sound but
our sheer, impossible laughter.