Forecast

I think that it could snow forever,
      she said.
I did not reply but watched
her cigarette smoke slowly rise
into the lamp shade.
A plate of bones and crinkled tin foil
grew cold and sticky on the table,
the windows black
like blowholes in the frozen arctic.

I thought of a painting I once saw,
a sailing ship its rigging thick with rime
propped up on white jagged shoals.
Tiny men were dragging boxes
of hardtack and brined meat
      out over the bulwark
down onto the vast ice,
strapping blankets round their pant legs
with thick rope.

It might, I said,
There's places
where the snow has never stopped.

It would be very silent.
She crushed her cigarette.
I listened and the windows whispered
with the voices of the city.
      Cars
and creaking bicycles, people
singing, drunk already, music
from a bar across the street.

There had been snow in the forecast.
We would have to see.
You ok?, she asked.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

I had never been so scared.