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136 KEVIN PRUFER IMMORTALITY LECTURE There is a way to be both here and not here. The cartoon cat stands just out of sight with the mallet. The cartoon mouse peers from his hole into the living room. Then yellow birds circle his head as he rises to heaven on angel’s wings. Your children have been watching tv for hours. The cat peels the mouse from the floor, drapes it over a piece of bread, and opens his mouth. The sun butters the windowsill on a Saturday morning in the summer before someone will die. On the birthday cake, a single candle sputters like a fuse the cat can’t blow out. The tv decorates their eyes with explosions of blue light. Their heads are like little rooms in which the mouse sits at his desk designing a rocket. They will always remember you like this, at your desk. And so, the cat soars above the house and explodes. Then the cat is in their heads designing a catapult. I have implied that someone soon will die. 137 All morning, dead relatives have marched through the room toward their rewards. The mouse is drawing a door on the wall with chalk. Now he is opening the door and stepping through it. The cat has drawn a tunnel on the wall that flattens him. Your children are bored. They’ve seen this one before and are changing the channel. You can never vanish from their world. 138 KEVIN PRUFER FROM INSIDE THE AVALANCHE Three months I’ve curled here like a yolk and they might not find me until the snow melts. My bent arm could tumble up a skier, or my cracked legs slip and pull me farther down the slope. + But for now I have made myself a dome to curl inside. I have made a cold, cold womb. And when the sun comes out, it fills me with a pale blue glow I can see my frost-bit fingers by. In this filtered light, my brain is a nimbler thing, and strange. It loves the slow derangements distance brings. Nights I cannot tell which way is up. + Such wine I drank to bring me to a place like this. And then I sobered up. Such pills I took, and down to the depths with them. And films and books to snuff my dull mind out— I turned the music up until my eardrums burst and flapped, and always I came back, back, back— 139 + Above, I hear the whoosh and swerve of skis, the thump of children and the creak of gears. Once or twice I poked numb fingers through and felt the cool winds tumble down the slope. + I suppose I could dig myself out. I suppose I could shamble down the hill and find the ski lodge where a warm fire burns. (And how the boys would gawk at my return! And how they’d shout!) Ice-encrusted, black where my thin skin froze, where my wrist-bones snapped and my nose fell off, I’d steam and pool, safe in the drama of my fine disgrace. ...

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