The magnolia outside the window is blossoming into the cotton-wool of snow, the coral-tipped branches all swaying punchdrunkenly in the breeze, their ends superclogged with ice, as the fingerlike buds cradle snow-lumps.

It's a mournful pose and I can't look away, but the world's indifferent. Low post-dawn clouds, busy grey ghosts, are rush-houring it southward, reverse-commuters with skirts passing just above the housetops, but quiet and efficient in their passage against a dirty white sky, like a stream of Wall Street assistants in their charcoal skirts and pale Nikes (pumps in the bottom right-hand desk drawer). And the birds, they're on the job hitting the headwind, muscling north, black, slick-speedy and crows-eye straightlining it somewhere past windowsville, not interested at all in one more dumbass flowering tree, rope-a-doped by a winter’s last savage trick.

UPDATE 2/2004: Comments deleted, and, I hope, closed. We'll see if I've been successful in establishing the latter.