The snowflakes of my unbound, unconscious imagination
swirl in oblivious spirals around me, somehow thriving off
the agitation of their once serene, crystalline realm.

In one, I see a reflection of a world I long to make real.
In another, I witness an echo of a memory; I reach out,
sometimes in an effort to grasp it and admire its beauty,
sometimes to swat it away from my view.

Inevitably, it lazily evades my swiping hand—
which seems, in this microcosmic pocket reality, so very incorporeal—
and wafts slowly downward, its path as remarkably aimless as ever,
until it lands softly on the ground, motionless.

For a brief moment it rests there, serene and still;
its facets, shimmering and delicate, refract the sporadic light
filtering through the blizzard in which I’m bound.

No sooner have I begun to fathom its beauty than it fades away,
its serenity coalescing with that of the calming storm,
each shimmering crystal falling until its fate is the same as its counterparts’.

Try as I may, I never can recall the form
of those fragile and graceful motes of light. Their
existence is left to me only a cryptic shadow of
what I feel so surely to have witnessed,
their true elegance forever lost to obscurity.