Book gloom seeps in, and the miserable weather is not an aid.

**

For an hour I let that sentence stand alone as a post, but I have since decided that it is not only unpleasant but possibly even bratty and that all it does is try make you gloomy alongside me. And why should you be? Why should I be, for that matter? Still, I'm not going to erase it: the statement is, after all, a truth of sorts. So instead I'll qualify it.

Snowflakes are sifting slowly, slowly from the iron sky. 

I am writing down one word, then a second word, then a third, until the sentence ends. 

Hot water gushes from the faucet. At the window two chickadees briskly burrow into the silted feeder tray.

This is by no means a poem . . . simply, a narrowing.