All We Have to Go By

 

As if I had dreamed the snow

into falling,
I wake to a world
blanked out
in its particulars,
nearly erased.

This is the silence
of absolute whiteness--the mute
birds nowhere
in sight, the car
and animal tracks
filled in,

all boundaries,
as in love,
ambiguous.
Sometimes all we have
to go by
is the weather:

a message
the snow writes
in invisible ink,
what the sky means
by its litmus
colors.

Now my breath
on the chilly window
forms a cloud
which may turn
to rain later,
somewhere else.

--Linda Pastan

[Subzero sunrise in Vermont]