falling asleep after the snow

For the third time in my life, I sleep in a room that’s adjacent to a flat roof. (In the warmest days of autumn, I’d step out of the window, blackening the bottoms of my feet on the tar paper.) Tonight, it’s snowed under, just an inch or two, as are the roofs and porches and fire escapes across the alley. There are people singing out there, and then the Amtrak horn four blocks south, and still the sleet on the skylight. I turn out my lights and can still see the room; the sky’s all orange-white even at three o’clock in the morning. (I wonder for a moment if nights were ever dark at all.)