Reprieve

It wasn’t snow
anymore but glitter
raining down from
some bright sieve
shaken over our construction
paper landscape
and turning us
into grade-school art
with macaroni birds
and too much glue,
which is maybe
why we stuck so well
side by side
in what wasn’t
snow but shiny
simple peace of mind
and calm that comes
from being fingerless
in warm mittens
without having to grasp
at finer details,
all the smaller work.
No tests of dexterity,
just boy walks with girl
and bumping
playful shoulders
in what wasn’t
for the moment
cold or slick,
what wasn’t hard,
what couldn’t have been
snow.

In moments when sudden grace suspends the hardest, coldest parts of relationship, everything feels like childhood. Even if it’s only an idealized, incomplete memory of innocence, the moments lifted free of struggle or negotiation have that sense of return to a place more pure. Maybe we saw each other more clearly before layers of experience divided us. Perhaps there was a time, before self-knowledge and preservation, when we were able to be more enamored with the fact of another. Save for a few commas, I’ve pulled as much punctuation as I can out of this poem and left the lines short, not because the scene is terse or curt, but because the distance between the figures has contracted. They are a mere arm’s length apart. This poem is twelve years old and I haven’t changed a word.