How much more of this? 

My long winter plea. I say it as I watch the dog negotiate the snow-turned-ice, picking his way around patches of toxic salt. 

I’m talking to the snow directly, now the color of an unwashed sock. I’m talking to the single-digit air singeing my lungs. I’m talking to the left-behind dog crap in the carcinogenic snow, the ungodly volume of which points to sustained apathy.

I’m talking to the sky, which is a dim, bloodless pink. As if God or any celestial thing has split for below the equator. I want the horizon to give way, churn up a thunderstorm. But February sky, broken up only by spindly, naked branches, is immovable. 

I can’t do much more of this. 

I’m talking about my winter coat, shaped like a sleeping bag and orange as a traffic cone. I once loved this coat, felt cocooned in its bright fluff. But it’s gotten dingy. It chokes me like a sarcophagus. One too many men that I do not know have commented on it, too, appraising its hue in the street. “Nobody will miss you in that thing,” they announce. Their tone nearly beckons a taxi to plow toward my body as a demonstration. 

I can, and must, technically, do some more of this. This ugly schlep. This despair. I think it’s been decreed by the groundhog, although I did not tune in and cannot stomach the results. There is talk of incoming record snowfall anyway––a fresh blizzard to cloak all the dog shit in white. 

How can we possibly take any more of this? 

I’m talking about being buried. I’m talking about the dark. 

I am talking about so many darknesses. 

I am talking about illness. About losing things and people. I’m talking about American murder. I’m talking about slow and deliberate poison. I’m talking about the little heads in my phone screen, all volleying damnation away from themselves and onto people who are trying simply to live. I’m talking about the politicians. How they materialize in my dreams, play in my sleep. Always like bobo dolls. I swing and grip their plastic faces, struggle to eke a real and final answer out of them. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes they apologize, admit. Mostly they do not. 

In the face of darkness, I am possessed by a need to dispel it. To bloodlet it with warmth. I light what feels like hundreds of candles. I pull matches across matchbooks, study the hushed exhalation of light. I stare into the flame because I have read that you can see into the origins of the universe by firelight. 

I strain to find it, to remember the fiery collisions of our beginning. I picture myself as a star. Less than a star. Cosmic dust, all those years ago, witnessing the birth of a thing that could not––would not––be someday felled by billionaire men. 

I try even talking to God. Saying what, I do not know. Other than please. Please help. Please heal. I exhale it. I mutter it, send it off my lips to anything that will hear. 

Ultimately, more snow falls. This time it is fast and sideways––an angry, whipping sheet. It comes in historic droves. It reaches our hips. 

Nobody can believe this. Very few––maybe school kids––want it. And yet there is a collective, incredulous heave of resolve. Dogged walks to the grocery store, new salt thrust to the ground. A squirrel clutches the tree outside my window, scrambles upward despite blinding snow; a seagull cries, high up, churning through the wind like a rogue kite. There is no choice but to persist. 

And by today, what has buried us is now receding. Winter is creeping backward, slithering into the gutters. And the sound of this––of water, moving––alerts me to my own body. I remember my pulpy, beating heart; I remember the muscles entwined around my bones, pulling me through space, plodding me forward. 

The trouble is far from over. The trouble is so old; it cannot dissipate with one turn of a season. Darkness will change shape, will continue on with the equinox. 

But I can smell earth. Can smell soil under cold detritus; there is vegetation struggling up from unseeable depths. I count on this humming promise, this germinating change. I study the horizon, the lengthening sunset; I praise whatever light I can.