The Day After The Day After Thanksgiving

I have lost a weeks long battle with what rhymes

The Day After The Day After Thanksgiving

It is the season for a squall, Thanksgiving’s over after all. She wants to write about the night the air filled up with falling white, but rhymes get in the way, and don’t belong. This is an essay, not a song! She has some sort of new affliction, is there a name for this condition that needs to rhyme, that has to scan? Her plan had been a piece of prose (which rhymes with throws at the crow’s nose a rose) and all of this is getting out of hand. Here is all she wants to say: the ice storm lasted until day, but when it stopped the ground was bare, nothing of it remaining there. Despite its strong and long persistence she saw how brief was its existence, here one night, then it was over, melted in what last year was clover. And probably leaves left over from the fall. Something her husband used to say keeps running through her head today,

“We only live once, if at all.”