Bright in the bedroom at eight in the morning the new snow -

Light was all a sun-changed warm kind dazzle. A crack

At the window, though, had let real snow in, all night a slow

Grainy insistent search. Something was probing the track,

Something out there, finding a way through, to hell with the law

Of double windows and furnaces, and don't think you can pretend.

Something out there was not even laughing about the early thaw

We hoped for, or our hope the glass thermometer would ascend,

Our hope for snow enough and only enough snow for moonlight sleighing.

The night we took the big old four-horse pung out the Durham road,

Fourteen of us, it was bone-cold, god-cold, too cold for staying,

And we came home early, something, a law against us, the winter code.