Snow

This winter finds me incomplete.
I wonder:
is there yet an outline of my hand on the doorknob,
foggily remembering where warmth once was?
Does the trail of my life leave such easy markers
as the snow, lined with the memory of my footsteps?

The cold has caught up to me and I am lost.
The path I have made is meandering and directionless,
and the unblemished field of snow before me
is terrifying in its uncertainty.
But I have forgotten in myself some sort of consciousness of feeling
that once would have stopped me
and I totter forward.

Still I am all in pieces;
change has not made me strong.
It does not comfort me
that I can flounder where I was frozen.
It does not comfort me
to have traded inaction for indifference.

My breath dies in wispy trails in my wake,
and when I turn to watch it fade,
I am divided.

I wish I had been like the snow,
cold and impenitent.
Though it falls unevenly, thick, then thin
beneath the steady tread of my boots,
it concentrates—
it is made compact.