When Snow Clouds Form (Final Version)

when snow clouds form in dreams about the prairie

I feel somehow reborn as if everything here

could be secretly made out of crystals

and the air itself holds so much crystal, pines

it is an amazement.

I wanted to walk for a long long time

tasting the crystal in a kind of prescient way

chill orange of the skies at mid day

I felt that bells rang out from the clouds or could or would

making it Christmas day haloed and hallowed

a glittering expectation not in a society way

not social at all

purely hushed for the soul and its reconfiguring;

invigorating so that your cheeks blushed cold

though you weren't aware of it

and you could hold the note in the song

so that the clouds chiding angels drift down

as if listening in a silver kind of way to that cantata only

with the doll like and lovely redundancies of jewel box ballerinas

implicitly on display covering delicately every fence I prayed

and the winds whistling as if from the far North

fairy tales; redundancies of the looking glass scattered

so that I remember only prisms and crowned with them then

passing the corner as I did then,

the out of date store fronts

it's all whirling I thought

there will never be anything more beautiful


mary angela douglas 24 september 2019