COUNT

The snow has cancelled the count of New York’s homeless,

who are sinking under the weight of the snow.

A thousand volunteers stood ready to tally

the denizen-shadows of a shadowy world,

but the snow, that drifted homeless between earth and sky,

has sealed the volunteers inside their homes,

though the homeless have volunteered to count

the flakes of snow as it falls around them.

The count was to be the most complete ever

of the five boroughs, but now only the snow is complete,

which seeks in vain to fall on the faux homeless,

who huddled here and there to test the accuracy

of the count, for the pretenders escaped

to their real homes and counted themselves lucky.

The snow is not faux but real, like the homeless,

who fall through their cancelled days untallied,

the snow that is a great blank page on which

no names of the homeless appear--

a single page, like this one, that doesn't count.

Philip Dacey's latest book, his tenth, is Vertebrae

Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009). For 35 years a resident of Minnesota and English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, Marshall, he moved to Manhattan's Upper West Side in 2004.