The forecast had not predicted it,
and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk

and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger
of rain. Then as night came she heard the world

relapse, slide backward into winter’s insistent
tick and hiss. In the morning, she woke to a powerless

house, the baseboards cold, the sky blank,
mercury hardfallen as the ice and fixed

even at noon. The woodpile on the porch dwindled
to its last layer; she had not replenished it

for a month and could see beyond it windblown ice
in the shed where the ax angled Excalibur-like,

frozen in the wood. Still, she didn’t worry
beyond the fate of the daffodils, green-sheathed,