ELEGY WITH SNOW


It’s July, in México,
and from the rooftop patio
the city, weatherproofed red,
reflects back the heat and smog
over the buildings to contort
the air so I can’t make out
the mountains to the south,
and as I look across I can’t
believe it but the first wet flakes
unfold from the air and sort of
flutter down; I stand up as,
all around, it’s as if someone
has torn open the sky
and through the smog suddenly
the white mountains seem close
enough to throw a pebble at (I imagine
a small ping against the great glacial ice),
and the shingles and the rooftops
and the mountains seem part
of a backdrop painted
with falling brushstrokes; and over
the patio wall, I look down
into the street, curiously
empty except for a spot of red,
and the snow is now dashing this way
and that above an object (yes—
a shawl someone dropped
on the sidewalk below),
obstructed by the snow
with its unchoreographed signs,
its cold ecstasy of triangles, spirals,
its apparition of empty cones;
and I think, but it won’t stick;
I open my hand to catch
the flakes and they melt the moment
they touch my skin; but there,
below, the red shawl catches the snow,
and the snow mottles it white; but how,
I think, could it not melt; and there,
in the seven stories down,
with the snow skating downwards
in a slow volley, I’m lost
in a movement outside of myself
but which I still feel—
in the way my arm moves up,
unconsciously, inevitably, to pull
my own blouse tight around my neck,
as if I were cold; and the sound
of a police siren winds through the streets;
and into that wail the snow
recedes; there is no shawl, no
snow; a woman—a neighbor,
who might just as easily have slipped
and not jumped—
has fallen from her window;
there is her body;
and sirens; and heat
coming off the pavement below.

Laura Bylenok's poetry has appeared in Subtropics, Hopkins Review, Unsplendid, Sugar House Review, Cimarron Review, Artful Dodge, and other journals. She is a new media editor for Quarterly West.