Saturday, February 17, 2018

   It is snowing. I have been lost in the hours of snow, in the minutes of cold that slip through the cracks of the day's chores. More snow is coming. The outside sounds are muffled more, as the door that allows in the chill seconds cannot now close.

shhhhh.

   I see a sow in the snow. She is a color that is between white and whiter. They are so many words for white but this one slips by, escapes me. I have no memory of the word I want, as I have no memory of the last snow, though I know both cover everything in still and smooth.
  A sow in snow, now nosing forward. She's dragging a leash behind her, a long tail listing in her lumpy  wake. I ache watching her furrowing away, fading into falling flakes.

shhhhh.

That color! Yes. It's the color of an old woman's hair, first coming through the skin, as thread thin or thick, downy white from foot to crown.  The old woman I am dreaming of is dancing naked, bare from tip to top. Her skin is colored like a shell, cold mottled and ridged in palest pink, olive, tawny gold, ebony. Where she turns, I follow a swerve of twirling lines, short and long. I watch her arms and legs bristle and flatten wet, her thin pubic hair send out star drops, her long mane surge and whirl around her. She is turning and turning and turning, curling in conch-like about herself. Her face is hidden by her flying hair. I want to believe she is smiling at me. What color? What color white is the right word, the one that could sign and deliver this white?


shhhh



   The best I can offer myself from myself to remember this snow show is the made-up clip of a Tibetan outlaw quest. Just as he is losing everything, falling down a mountain, or maybe into a lake, or wait, on a slope, there's an opening in a drift from which this Tibetan outlaw is plucked, by the hand of a man. Afterwards, when he's been laid on the ground downwind and almost out of this world, I reimagine him as the dying repentant, dying open to grace and goodness. His breath will fall as he did, and rise rattling up softly, quietly.  As the snow blows, so he'll go. He'll disappear into the whites around him. Stones? I thought stones for a cairn for him. And an epitaph, something like he sought, he fought, he lost, he won. As I build this scene, I begin to forget. The white comes fiercely, carried on light, furious flakes. Dazed, I leave the Tibetan outlaw laying under a drift in the driving snow.

shhhhh


A soothing muse, that's traffic in snow, like the blow of a whispered consonant or the wisp exhalation before full stop, rest. Quiet. Passages of words, the right ones, the discarded and obsolete ones, limits and laws of stopping and steering forward, the speed of them, the special power of some and not others. There are signs above, at corners, the rules to obey, the direction and cadence to use to continue. The snow makes them difficult to read, so we mark location, locution, and remember, It's all very quiet, this remembering, hushed, whooshed watery through consciousness.


shhhh



I'm watching the snow. I've lifted up my hands, the palms smoothing mountains, nothing but winds waiting outside, all that I will find.  No sow now, or dead man, no stones to settle, nothing but snow.
I know it's a dream, but it seems so real, this white storm hummocking away from me.  I could swear it's fleeing, as though seeing me in this window, my warmth fogging circles on the glass, frightens it.



shhhhh