Fresh Tracks

Walking down Second Street
taking artful, erratic steps
slow languishing Southern drawl steps
wide and small steps,
a skid
a slash
a hop-hop-hop.

It's momentary art
Like the Buddhas and their mandalas
of sand
built to blow away
to be buried
to change and manifest.

Such is life

It is snowing again

snowing again

Just my two feet and
eight perfect paws
tracking up the freshly fallen snow
creating what could only be described as
"Modern Art" (one can get away with anything, it seems)

All black
All white
tonight

We forgo the sidewalk for straight down the street
cuz we can
in Carbondale
on Sunday night

the tree trunks are glistening wet
striking black
with bent branches stretching out like spiny fingers to the sky

stark
still
silent
skinny

like a coked out fashion model on a New York runway

the trees seem so vacant tonight

almost lonely

I float on my feet down that long flat river of white-wet
it is damp,
but not cold
smells like winter is fighting with spring

I pause under the streetlamps
gazing at the water
falling
as flakes of snow

can't move

frozen in time

like a Norman Rockwell painting,
still, but animated
a girl looking up
under a lamp
flakes as big as cotton balls piling up on her hat, her jacket,
her pink face

It is a look,
her look,
like a Mona Lisa smile,
that would make a passerby
pause and wonder
just what she's thinking
as she breathes in this moment


Keep looking
and you will see
she is mesmerized by the light
the falling snow

and

the soft
sudden
silence
of
Second Street
on Sunday.