Earth Again

Wintering

59 wintering —some frigid mornings the snow fell sideways instead of down, striking your cheek with countless pinpricks, as if the world wanted inside of you. If wind blew off the lake, white clumps formed in the crooks of branches, eggless nests, birdless too, small brains the gusts dismantled: thought extinguished, falling and aglimmer. Evenings we skied across the lake towing the boy behind us in the sled, poorer than we’d ever been, the lake beneath the ice a deep shadow of the ice—tell me that line again, she’d ask —bluish, associating with their shadows— and happier too. At dusk a single shanty lantern, faintly, first; at dawn the same disappearing into day, light on light. Often from a stone building’s open windows students rehearsed solos, and oboe notes floated toward us as if on parasols, and once the young cellist from Japan, who looked always like she’d been crying, met us on the path and bent to place her earphones in the boy’s ears: Puccini, she said, flakes collecting, melting in his lashes. Wraiths of snow, brittle leaves sketching their way to rest; more weeks of wet wool, flannel, snowsuits steaming up the window whose frame bled groggy ladybugs, droplets from unseen veins. Then, without harbinger, a dawn with the scent of the Gulf in it, rumors of warmth urging schools of mint fish into shallows 60 to wait for rain at the creek’s threshold. The thaw begun: brusque aubade, no kiss for the snow from the roof, just a gentle shrug and the gutters spilling over. Three straight days. The eaves thrumming until the sun appeared like a ghost whose presence no one questioned. Walked down to the morphing shoreline to bathe in this warmth with the nymphs wriggling through slush and an ice fisherman jigging, on the punk ice, from his bucket, for smelt, his bait twisting in the liquid dark beneath him like a seed. ...