Think of Snow

You're standing at your picture window.
You look at the fence. Typical picket: pretty.
It's cold outside: low 10 degrees.
Typical winter evening: grey, overcast skies.
You're looking outside, and it begins to snow,
and you watch it snow.
And it snows and snows and snows.
And it gets deeper: four or five inches,
while you're standing there - and then it quits.
Nobody has to tell you it's snowing:
you can see it - everything's white.

Okay - same circumstances.

Blustery, cold night, but no snow.
Grey, overcast skies, so you go to bed.
Next morning you wake up
and there's four or five inches of snow.
All over, covered, a white blanket.
Nobody has to tell you it snowed.
The fence has disappeared. It snowed!
But you didn't see it snow.
Silent snow, secret snow - but it snowed.
When the dogs don't bark - I know.

But the prints; where'd the footprints come from?
Evidence, you see.
Others can't see the snow,
let alone the footprints.
No, no, they say there's nothing there
- snow or footprints.
To them, it's all melt: melted away.
But I know: I can still see the evidence
through the muffle - the silence.

The evidence is still falling everywhere.
Even here, in the room, from the ceiling.
Footprints are all around, you see,
leading from the window, from the bed
to the snowman standing here with me.
What I'm giving you here is evidence.
Nothing circumstantial: material fact.
It just happens to melt.

Grey again, overcast, overhead.
It's beginning to snow again.
But when you're caught between,
you know, the window and the bed,
you sometimes melt into the carpet
leaving the floorboards - a little damp.

There's your evidence, you see:
beneath the carpet, beneath the felt.
I know when it snows and snows and snows.
It leaves impressions in the pretty carpet.
Something to hold onto; something to stand on.
Gives you structure, you know - and standing.