Allen C. Fischer

FLOATERS

Black snow…one flake, then
another. They don’t go anywhere,
don’t come down but drift,
float within my eyes like microfeathers
caught in delay,
suspended in a trance of space.
Space, the once and future window
that relays my life across its lens,
shore to shore across expectation
and everything I fear.
Space of my slowing and eventual
bedside. Arithmetic so simple, a clock
so regimental, I don’t try to change it,

don’t try to rub the tiny shadows away
or remove the specks come loose from the back
of my eyes. After all, they’re temporary
debris, at worst the body’s storm warnings.
Don’t! my mother would call. Nothing you can do,
advised the doctor, like weather, it will pass.
And maybe the woman in white at the end of the room
is not a nurse but my wife in a beach robe,
and the cloud around her is the packing in which
memory comes; and maybe the occasional
flashes I see are not a storm but stars trying
to break through the ominous forecast: black snow,
blinding at times; accumulation heavy; falling
temperatures; stay tuned, stay where you are.

—from Rattle #24, Winter 2005