Snowflakes

Before getting ready for bed
You go out to check
The snowfall's accumulation:
Should you start shoveling now
Or get up earlier than usual.
You look at your car's vanished bumper
And at the cold halo of the streetlight
Where swirling snowflakes
Make their brief appearance.

Those snowflakes transport you
Fifty years back to another snowfall,
In the Tatra mountains where you parents
Sent you for "fresh air"; your parent's friends
Had a housekeeper who came from a small village
In these parts, which is why you were here
Breathing fresh air with the housekeeper,
And the friends' daughter, a girl your own age
Which was seven or eight, perhaps.

During the day you played with her in wet snow
At night, the housekeeper would visit
Her friends and relatives in the village.
She'd come home drunk, collapse in her bed and snore.
The snoring was the girl's signal
To get our of her bed leaving her nightgown behind
Come under you covers and invite you to do "things" to her.

You were too scared to move or say anything
Except to point to the window over the bed
To try to interest her into checking
Whether she could see any snowflakes that would
Promise fresh snow for the next day.

The girl has now been dead for many years,
Died young of breast cancer in New York City,
I still can't force myself to write her name.