Pretty Bleak

UPDATE! ENG 203 students helped me revise.  We put in “bleeding” instead of “blue-gray” in line five, AND we’re contemplating using a verb/gerund in the last line, something along the lines of dancing/prancing like a gas (based on the heaving and skipping preceding it).

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for Alayne

PRETTY BLEAK

Unremittingly gray and beige and white,

The forecast should have called for headache weather.

This must be what arthritis looks like

From inside the land of pain. Frozen virus showers.

Bleeding  pewter, slate, graphite, gray.

Dirty snow. Even pine trees look more black than green.

Oh, February. Oh, Wisconsin. Oh.

I would flush this bleakness like shit if I could.

Another month at least of scraping the windshield.

Of all plans depending on what the weather pretties say.

I almost don’t believe in hot and humid,

In a day when there is zero percent chance of snow.

And yet, just that fast, the snow’s subliming,

Heaving from solid, skipping liquid, free as a gas.

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Snow in Italy (NASA Goddard Photo and Video NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

We know it snows in Italy.  Here’s proof.

But that’s not what we think of when we think of Italy. Here’s to a sunny day, sitting on a stone veranda, drinking a chewy wine out of one of those little water glasses.  Cheers!

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(photo from Flickr, Creative Commons)