What wind moved these flurries? Everything was silent behind the window. They meshed under the streetlight, they clanked against the pole, melted together under the bulb, got ripped apart over the darkness. The whole week the city cracked over its own edge. It had snowed once on Sunday, an unexpected and sweeping whiteness that had debranded the cars, deleafed the trees, leveled the autumn and disappeared. It had melted as soon as it came and now the city was nervous. The holidays stood like a doorman over the streets. Barrel-chested. Heavy. The air thinned. Heads fugued at the store windows, postal workers hackled in the side alleys, everything rattled like a cockpit.

And then it came again. A slow, ethereal march of the flakes, a Tchaikovsky dance of the lilliput swans over the twilight. Like a dream, the snow came only at night. It came at night and changed everything. This was not the post-thanksgiving cold that had prematurely gripped the air, gripping until a thin frost climaxed over the pavements. This was a graceful and pale hand of the unseen, the good and beautiful unseen that was beginning to stick to the windowsills and antennas. Where had it come from?

So often then it seemed as if the world was under occupation. The unseens were everywhere. Car engines scratched satan-like beneath the window one moment and clothes danced lightheartedly over a string the next. The room crashed into your stomach during the night only for the air to be suddenly plentiful in the morning. The world somehow had taken to passing itself in freight trains through the ribs and nobody seemed to know why.

It was only an hour past sunrise and I stood at the street, keeping my eyes on the coats and scarfs and backpacks carefully making their way to the train. There was a thoughtfulness that a newly fallen snow gave to a morning. Feet moved slowly, words slid around the collars without a sound. I stood in a driveway, my head bent, feeling the warm and irreplaceable silence of sunlight over my neck and my nose. There was really nothing like it. Everything was at a sudden yet worried peace. I stayed where I was, feeling the street wake up around me. Doors began to open, exhaust pipes rattled to a start, shoes stepped out over the stoops, they lay their faces slowly to the newly fallen snow. They rubbed their cheeks into it like a pillow. With each step they crunched the powder, they chewed it without a hurry.

Hryuuush.

Hryuuush.

I opened my eyes slightly to the sounds and instantly began taking small notes in my head. I wanted to write something about this, to capture it all somehow. Yet, nothing came. I thought about Hopper, Wyeth, Seurat. The previous night I had went again to the museum, never going up but instead lingering outside by the lobby. Back to back cigarettes and indecision ultimately led me to the store and there I had spent most of the night. Looking around, reading. In truth, there was a Hopper anthology I had always went there to see, and finding an odd copy of it stranded near a guide to Lisa Minelli, I had fled with it to an abandoned corner. For an hour I must have stood there, beats and cellos within my ears, my fingers tracing their way across each print, focusing at a point within the painting where it all seemed to merge. There was something there, there was something undeniably there. But what was it? Was it silence he painted? Was it the frozen movement of the moment? After songs upon songs of tracing, it hit me - the bastard! He was painting the unseen. The unseen stuck between the spaces, locked in bars and bedrooms and gas stations, everyday eating us and massaging us… I lifted my eyes over the book and glanced around. Were the students, the clerks, the shelves, vases books lights – were these all the result of the unseen? Was the unseen all that there really was? Was it the charged ether that seemed to flood the cities? Did the atmosphere merely blanket over its round body, keeping it all from spilling?

I stood at the street thinking of this, watching a car pass here and a parent scold a child there, gathering the seens in an effort to describe the unseen. The sunlight. The people. Small exhales of vapor. Two-legged locomotives choo-choo-ing their way onward. I had always preferred to write in the mornings. The world becomes clear. Simple. Even the unseens slumber calmly and lethargically. Yet nothing would come. I watched the flakes, the few of them still left in the air, slightly pick up, carry over a car and a porch, nestle under a canopy. I thought of ways to describe them. I took in the details. A light wind came again and a nearby rooftop popped soundlessly like a blender, the flakes dancing eagerly upward then downward, dropping into the driveway and coming back up. There was really no way to describe them. No metaphors to build, no mediums to combine. They were flurries, only small little flurries, warm flurries, cold flurries, hard edged and soft flurries dancing in a horrific, beautiful slavery to the wind. I stood in the driveway and watched them, closing my eyes and opening them again, letting my feet grow slightly cold and my nose grow warm.