still

Five a.m.: New snow on the city sidewalks is even, undisturbed, luminous. When a solitary walker crosses the surface, her passage is reflected in sharp-edged footsteps, which are not unattractive--at first. But two feet will become four, will become forty, will become four hundred, the dazzling stillness forgotten. It's enough to make one despair, but for this: just under the surface of the fine flakes, I see the ghost treads of one who earlier walked this way. Not much longer and those marks will recede entirely, as will mine, and all the rest, blanketed by the diamond-bright drifts whose own eventual disappearance is but a change in form.