They said we should tape the windows; store candles and water, on no account go to work or ride the subway. Lights out. And the sky that morning through the tenement windows—a greeny yellow, a dangerous glow, but muted as sound in a snowstorm, a bandage wrapped around the suddenly slowed city. The poet Mary Ruefle writes that whenever it snows she wishes for someone to make love to— all day in a bed of rumbled white sheets, the blinds open to flake and shower. And it was like that—the hurricane day for the storm that never came. Friends came and we drank bourbon in our coffee. We kept the lights out as instructed lit candle after candle, burning our fingers and having to suck on them like children. When the friends went home three floors up, we lay down in our bed like two good children. I touched your face, mapping it finger-length at a time. How utterly such moments get lost. You would be officially diagnosed schizophrenic within the year. I would be living on the other coast, wheeling a pram up the bare California hills, saying to myself that this is what exile is, the world like a party full of strangers or people you no longer wish to know. But if it all could be held as under glass—as under those touristy plastic domes, which you shake to make the synthetic flakes fall, knowing all the while it is really not cold in there, it is really a little plastic toy filled with some chemical version of salt water, and yet doesn’t it give just the tiniest dizzying thrill? If it could be held as under glass, I would pick that day. The promise of storm so freeing so that I could admit everything that was wrong—with you, with me, with us, our apartment of cardboard boxes, unmatched dishes, empty bottles of alcohol and emptied packs of cigarettes, even the death-music turning on the turn- table, always someone singing about how to get lost or more so, as if the expiration date was already stamped on us; admit all this and think none of it mattered, only the gloaming light over the skyscrapers and the strange warm wind we finally walked out in toward evening finding sidewalks clotted with people like us who had waited all day for the hurricane and now were dazzled, smiling at the ordinary streets, which seemed at that moment suddenly radiant, transfigured, the eye of everything.