After reading the FBI files



"you are as many as the flakes of snow," hard to think, so many, each one's lazy 

fall and drift of circumstance, a fingerprint of heaven, it would be wrong to think 

about this that this, you have been carefully instructed, the weather here is 

different, all reports are clear warnings of snow that  goes on falling and falling, 

erasing again the lines just cut from the doors of private houses to the public 

streets,  obliterating paths, frostbite is a loss of feeling in one’s extremities, or a 

hand freezes to a fence gripped to keep the body from falling, why did you think 

you could sleep in the snow, lie down in its languorous embrace, foetal as a 

snowflake or like that woman in New Jersey who lost her toes for being unable 

to curl herself up small enough to fit on the steam grate, did the cold arrive in 

your veins like warmth, if the snow's embrace shocked your cells open to 

tropical transpirings, that was just the rapture of hypothermia, a gushing in the 

veins so chilled the snow arrived like warmth, what are you thinking of, don't 

you know it's wrong to think as you are, you are, I know you are, thinking about 

this that this, learn to read the weather rightly to consider the hours of the 

snow, snow's not scraps of paper devoid of any word except the ash particle, 

the cindered mote that coalesces that lazy architecture around its invisible eye, 

you could freeze out there, not that I care, it's just faulty thinking, that's all, why 

did you think you could sleep in the snow, you could lose your extremities, your 

fingers, in some cases the tip of your nose, if someone in an office is writing 

and writing, the names as many as the flakes of snow piling up in drifts, that 

new names are falling on the drifts of the names that were, just yesterday,  

dumped in empty lots, heaps of white, heaven’s flesh already turning to exhaust 

and ash with the city’s grime sweating from the air, now turning newly white 

again with new accumulations, oh name that turns to a drift of snow, it’s better 

not to think of what makes the mind so cold, able to discern with x-ray vision 

the underlying death sentence that this one deserves, or that  one, hard to 

consider,  so many, sentences purging within, each one's lazy fall and drift of 

circumstance, a singer, a finger print of heaven, read the finer print,  the egotist 

in that one, 'too preoccupied with success' 'can be bought with various _______' 

'documents of a compromising nature,' 'overheard to say on May 15th' is this 

coldness as natural in the hand that wields it as a skin, sky, filling with snow? 

you should not think in the way you do of these intersections of snow, none of 

this intersects in you, that's just a village of people who did not know they were 

neighbors vanishing in the snow, you'll have to get up out of that drift and try to 

find your way home, what were you thinking of, trying to sleep in the snow, this 

direction, in that one, follow the street signs, it's just a snowstorm, making the 

air warm, after the snowplows do their work,  follow the science of the 

meteorologists, impartial  thinkers,  they know what they're saying when they 

say afterwards will follow the realm of frostbite,  the diminishments of cold 



Rebecca Seiferle

10:41 Waltham MA 1/