The sun is searching for a place to stay

[sovay]

We are estimated to receive a foot of snow in the year's first winter storm, which is busily plastering over our windows as municipal snowplows bang in the street outside. I can't tell yet if staying inside for snow feels altered by this year of staying inside for plague, nine months now and no nice due date to point to. Lately I have been falling asleep in the evenings and waking after midnight when I would prefer to be winding down to sleep. Tomorrow I have to call the kind of bureaucracy that's trying to kill me, not the much rarer kind that I was so pleasantly surprised to deal with last week. I couldn't catch the real sodium-pinpointed wind-blue of the air no matter how I tried, but I liked watching the white sand of the snow blow past our back deck.

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Fimbulwinter

[nodrog]

… A meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd…

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths…

Lord Byron, “Darkness”