The Day It Snowed In L.A.

The day it snowed in L.A.
And frost settled on Satan's citrus groves,
Strange white objects, drifting from the sky,
Landed on a key grip's hybrid Yukon.
PANIC!
They smashed their cars into cars
bent themselves around Adopt-A-Highway signs
plowed into a carniceria
(there were no plows to run into)
And I laughed
Like the anchormen back home always laugh
when they run footage of the first ice storm in Dallas or Flagstaff
or wherever there are pansy-ass Southerners
who don't know how to drive in winter.

LA burned,
The snowdust burned off.
Traffic was about as bad as usual.

***

Campus lies somewhere at the bottom of a 50 degree puddle that
The flipflop girls turn to whine.
Shameful, I think, as I march for the door--
Jesus H. Christ!
On my way, a million memories turned excuses--
kids in the backseat waiting for the engine to heat up
shoppers crossing Nicollet on the skyway rhizome
boots and hats and scarves melting in the mudroom
I have a pool but no parka.
I have crocs but no car.
But I have what I have because I left what I don't.
I chose palm trees and mountains
over dead leaves and gritty March snowpack shells.
Over the graceful New Year's whisper
of an ice-cold bumper kissing a bank of plow-tossed snow
I chose four hundred mangled cars.

In Lake Wobegon, they say
the Southern mind, basking in the sun,
gets soft, and slow, and simple.
Out on the North Shore, or the windswept western prairie,
the weather keeps our wits sharp,
the way October snow cuts cheeks like ice shards in the gale.
Dad says he worries about me.

***

You know,
I won't ever admit it
But when the winter dips to minus 30
(as it always does when I'm home)
when the infernal window draft pinches any sleeping toe or bare shoulder
when the wind is an icicle crucifixion
and there's no one there to share the bed
I shake like in the California night rain.

The weather is our Paris Hilton--
We can't stop talking about it.
The weather column reads like a tabloid:
grown men unable to untie their frozen shoelaces for an hour,
YouTube videos of frictionless cars,
crocuses in February.
But for all our talk we will never complain
Never speak ill of the dead, frozen on the side of a gravel road.
It's cold, but it's been colder
So put on another sweater!
And God help you if you compare prairie blizzards
to that one time it snowed in LA.

Finals week and everyone's busy
No time to eat, to sleep, to play,
to wish for death--if only
Finals week and everyone's coughing,
choking, sneezing, hurling,
dead asleep for 24 hours straight
Forget the sunshine and the sprawl
Forget the desert and the drainage problems
Forget the palm trees and cacti covered in lights
Finals week and I just can't wait--
I'm going home to a white Christmas.