Peculiar kinds of snow today.
No wind.  Dead calm.
Four degrees below freezing.
I was out for a little walk.
It began with tiny white pellets,
not much bigger than mustard seeds.
They behaved kind of like those little white beads of Styrofoam
that stick to you when you when you take your new TV out of the box,
only the opposite in physics.
They bounced off the dark green of my nylon coat, showering back upwards.
Then, a few minutes’ pause, as I made perfect black footprints
in the whitened sidewalks.
Next, I felt the tingling on my nose, chin, and eyelashes as I looked up
at the flaky white dust descending.
Flakes so fine that gravity had little effect upon them.
They tumbled, dancing across and seeming to hang motionless before settling.
At last came the heavy artillery.
Communities of the sparkling travelers were binding together
to form wide, saucer-like flakes, spinning in a gradual descent
looking, for all the world, like those helicopter maple seeds
that would soon come to the neighborhood,
spiraling down to clog our pristine eaves troughs
with the sediment of spring.