Category: Uncategorized

I slept in until 7:30 this morning – about two and a half hours later than usual. A new dusting of snow on the ground and more in the air added to my disorientation. There was just enough snow to coat the flattened grass, making the path up to the other house exceptionally slippery. But now – a few minutes past noon – I look up from my writing table and see that somehow in the last three quarters of an hour the lawn and fields have returned to the wan colors they wore yesterday. The male cardinal comes in and lands on a branch three feet from my window, his dark red the brightest thing for miles. He tilts his dunce-capped head back and forth, as if deciding whether to launch an attack on his reflection for old time’s sake. I’m sure that fellow in the window is just as much of a mocker as he was last June, but he’s safe for now. After half a minute the cardinal flies off. Ever since breakfast I’ve been thinking about chowder, the kind with potatoes and cheese, canned tomatoes and frozen yellow corn. It will go well with the last of the pumpernickel bread. Wish you were here.

Would it be accurate to see bloggers as private investigators working in the public eye?

Perhaps not. A private eye, as the early 20th century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki often pointed out, is someone who rummages through other people’s garbage. That is, the private eye brings to public view what is and should remain private.

Soseki embodied the tension between modernity and tradition. Surely one of the pillars of modernity is this notion that nothing is off limits to the inquisitive mind – everything should be held up to the light. To citizens of modern, Western states, the veil and the harem are the essence of backwardness. The idea that there might be power in the retreat from view is anathema. Our gaze is resolutely public. People who will not look us straight in the eye are assumed to be untrustworthy. To be honest, we think, necessarily entails baring the soul.

In non-Western and vernacular traditions, however, things aren’t so clear-cut. Correspondence between word and deed, rather than a confessional impulse, might be seen as the most accurate measure of honesty. Meeting another’s gaze may be interpreted as an act of aggression – the same way a dog or wolf would interpret it.

In many cultures, the ear may be considered a more reliable witness than the eye. Hearing is much more closely akin to thought; vision is a thing of the body, and adheres to surfaces in a way that can only be considered promiscuous. Our most private parts may be endowed with at least figurative vision: the one-eyed trouser mouse, a notoriously amoral creature. The vagina during childbirth – an exothalmic eye with protective powers.

Vision dissects, says psycholinguist Walter Ong. Is it only given to artists and poets to enjoy a walk in the fog?

What we think we know about seeing is not only culturally biased, but bears the inevitable impress of our species, for which an unusually well developed visual cortex must be balanced against a corresponding diminution in the other senses. One need only look at blind people to see how rich and even beautiful a world without vision still might be.

The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise – and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he’s never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

. . . We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality through our eyes. But is it? How much of what we think of as seeing really comes from without, and how much from within? The visual cortex may have a much more important role than we realise in creating expectations for what we are about to see, says Pascual-Leone. “Seeing is only possible when you know what you’re going to see,” he says. Perhaps in Armagan the expectation part is operational, but there is simply no data coming in visually.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a person can’t have a “mind’s eye” without ever having had vision. But Pascual-Leone thinks Armagan must have one. The researcher has long argued that you could arrive at the same mental picture via different senses. In fact he thinks we all do this all the time, integrating all the sensations of an object into our mental picture of it. “When we see a cup,” he says, “we’re also feeling with our mind’s hand. Seeing is as much touching as it is seeing.”

(via Marja-Leena Rathje)

*

I perceive a thing because I have a field of existence and because each phenomenon, on its appearance, attracts toward that field the whole of my body as a system of perceptual powers. . . . Cézanne declared that a picture contains within itself even the smell of the landscape. He means that the arrangement of the colour on the thing (and in the work of art, if it catches the thing in its entirety) signifies by itself all the responses which would be elicited through an examination by the remaining senses; that a thing would not have this colour had it not also this shape, these tactile properties, this resonance, this odour, and that the thing is the absolute fullness which my undivided existence projects before itself.

M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Colin Smith, tr., Routledge, 1962)

*

The question is not only: what am I looking at? The question is also: what is looking at me?

*

Apart from his height and ancient black leather trench coat the most striking thing about him was the fact that he had a pair of eyes tattooed on the back of his shaven head. Bright blue, opposite the pair I assumed were on the front of his head, staring straight out at anyone following. Like me. I have still not overcome my inability to photograph recognisable people without asking them first, and I didn’t want to speak to him. So [the accompanying illustration] is a tattoo found randomly on the net. Mr Covent Garden’s second pair of eyes was not quite so feminised, but still somehow slightly coquettish. I didn’t see the operational pair for comparison.

*

The fake eyes of P. troilus were well known to butterfly enthusiasts, but what had apparently escaped notice is the directionality of their stare. Or perhaps I should say the nondirectionality, for the eyes appeared to look in all directions at once. Their stare was uncanny. If you loked at the caterpillar from directly in front, it stared back. If you looked at it from the sides, or from behind, or from above, it likewise appeared to return the look. There was no direction from which a predator could approach the caterpillar without finding itself visually “confronted” . . .

There can be little question that the eyes of P. troilus draw the attention of an approaching predator. They certainly draw our own, and are in fact what gives the caterpillar away when you search for it on its food plant. There is ample experimental evidence that the circular disk, highlighted by a dark pupillary center – the eye image – attracts human attention. If you trace the eye motions by which a human being scans a facial image, the glances are seen to be cast back and forth from one eye of the image to the other, and to be directed only occasionally to other facial features such as the mouth and nose. . . .

In art there is also a way to impart to eyes the ability to gaze in different directions. There are paintings that “follow” you as you walk past them, portraits with a seeming ability to maintain a visual hold on you as you pass them by. . . . One trick . . . is to impart upon the two eyes a slightly divergent direction of view, so that one eye appears to stare at you while you are at the left of the portrait and the other while you are to the right. You are thus never out of eye contact with the painting no matter from where you view it.

Thomas Eisner, For the Love of Insects (Belknap Press, 2003)

*

Every image maker has a persona, wrote the text maker, clambering into the barrel of my camera’s lens, crawling through the half-cocked diaphragm (set to f3.5 for the narrowest depth of field), then leaping, ever nimble, from mirror to mirror and diving out through the viewfinder, right through astigmatism-correcting plastic, twice-scratched cornea, aqueous humor, lens, vitreous humor until, finally, he lies panting, tangled in the remarkably weed-like wefts of my retina.

I must find the text-maker’s weed persona, I thought, sitting down, opening another light-box, poring over image after image.

*

A master escape artist whose soft body can contort itself through the smallest of openings, the octopus is the brainiest of animals without backbones, and it has keen eyesight. Those attributes attracted Albert Titus, a University of Buffalo professor, to study how an octopus sees, and to mimic that structure and function in a silicon chip called the o-retina.

*

But Titus isn’t content to merely replicate the functioning of a specific retina. His ultimate goal is to build a complete artificial vision system, including a brain that mimics the visual systems of various animals, so humans can look at the world differently.

Titus also hopes this system will eventually allow him to connect different “eyes” to different “brains” – allowing, for example, a lion’s brain to process images as seen by an eagle’s retina.

“The visual system is more than eyes,” Titus said. “An animal uses eyes to see, but the brain to perceive. Yet, the retina is an extension of the brain, so where does the distinction between seeing and perceiving begin and end?”

*

There’s hardly a part of the body
that can’t learn vision, clock stopped
at the center of a hurricane,
all-seeing shape that plays for keeps.
It shines.
It weeps.

*

Between February 12 and February 27, the art will happen, in time and in space. The brevity of the experience will heighten the urgency of what happens.

And what happens in those sixteen days will depend precisely on each observer, on each person who experiences it, their physical vantage point, their state of mind, their receptivity to the pleasures and challenges of altered vision.

In this sense, the viewer is the fourth essential element in the Gates as a work of art.

– “the Eye”

*

The almond tree is in blossom. Pica brought in a branch to draw but Charlie sniffed it and started munching on the blossoms! He didn’t let go either, and ran off with the branch, muttering possessive growls along the way.

*

After last night’s hijacking of my sprig of blossoms, I went out and got another. Here’s a drawing done on one of my new sheets of Canson Mi-Teints. I realize using colored pencils on this paper can’t quite work the same way, so I think next time I’ll do the entire drawing in white tempera before I start adding color.

These blossoms smell intensely like honey. It’s a wonderful thing to have them out your back door.

The further adventures of Plank.

Suddenly I’m back in his good graces, but that’s mostly because he needs a third person to play house. He and Plank have become inseparable. “Let’s go climb trees,” he’ll say, and go rummaging about for a long rope so he can haul his buddy up with him. Other times they go down to the road and watch cars go by. Some of the drivers honk and wave, but I’m not sure he ever waves back.

I’m usually napping when he comes home from school. “Boy!” he’ll shout in my ear. “I thought I told you to mow the goddamn lawn.”

I’m not a boy, actually, I’m a girl, and theoretically he knows this. But any attention is better than none at all.

“Supper’s on,” he’ll call, and sure enough, there’s an old door up on blocks with plates and glasses and everything. Plank is already seated when I shuffle over. It’s wearing an apron, and it appears to have gained several new layers of red crayon around the mouth. I gather it’s not a boy any more. For all its immobility – being just a board and all – Plank actually has quite a bit more flexibility than the average companion.

“What is this?” the boy asks, picking up his empty plate and tilting it back and forth. “My God, it’s still moving!” he says in mock terror, and drops the plate. Then he takes a sip from his glass and starts to choke. “What are you trying to do, poison me?” He swings one arm against Plank’s face, knocking her and the chair backwards onto the floor. “Can’t you do anything right?”

With unsteady hands he raises the glass again to his lips and very slowly takes another sip, then another. I can smell the alcohol. “Ahhh,” he says, pretending to enjoy it, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he starts to cry.

“Why don’t you get up?” he burbles, and tips the chair upright. Plank smiles fixedly. He cries a little more, interrupted by hiccups. “Boy, finish your supper!”

I press my long tongue to the empty plate and give it an exploratory taste. It’s not too bad, really, once you get used to it.

The eight inches of soil covering my buddy L’s septic tank were, surprisingly, unfrozen. Here I had come all this way with pick and wrecking bar, expecting to be of at least some use, and it turned out that the only tools we needed were ordinary shovels. In less than fifteen minutes we were able to clear all the dirt off the aluminum panel that had been placed over the decaying hatch last time the tank was pumped. I insisted we make sure it was removable, so L. got a crowbar and we levered it up.

“Yep, that’s a full septic tank, all right. Damn.” Flump goes the cover back in place. “Mission accomplished,” L. says.

We had known it might not be too big a deal, but L. had decided to take pity on me. This was my first extended time off the mountain and my first real social interaction in over two weeks. And if there were ever a safe time to shirk my caretaker responsibilities, the afternoon and evening of Super Bowl Sunday would be it.

So we talked, looked at books, talked some more, did a minor wiring job, rustled up some supper, and talked. But ’round about 6:15 we found ourselves gravitating toward the back room – the one with the television in it. Hey, why not see what we’re missing? L. is a bit of a pop culture maven.

It was all there, everything I detest about America: the kitsch, the glitz, the adulation of celebrity, the extreme sexual dimorphism, the militaristic triumphalism, the graceless display of brute force. Look, the Tuskegee airmen! A bunch of mentally handicapped people doing a heartwarming rendition of “America the Beautiful”! Bill Clinton and George Herbert Walker Bush marching shoulder to shoulder! Live video feeds of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, watching us watching them and standing, for some reason, at attention! Everyone fixed his or her gaze on the giant video screen when instructed. Everyone held up his or her little laser light and swayed in unison when instructed. Everyone loved Sir Paul McCartney when instructed. It was like a dumbed-down version of the Triumph of the Will.

And then there were the ads. My, my, my. Every time I watch television anymore, I am dumbstruck by how painfully skinny all the supposedly hot babes are. I guess it’s human nature to worship what we are not. You want self-fulfillment? Drive a convertible. Drink Bud Light. Have some more tostitos.

Toward the end of the halftime, L. suddenly said, “You know what? I don’t think I have a chip in the house!”

“Let’s go make some, then,” I said. I do love potato chips.

A little later: “Have you ever done this before?”

“Nope. You?”

“Nope.”

It’s not like we needed more food. My belly was still comfortably full from supper – Indian dal soup and several slices of L.’s outstanding sourdough bread, followed by Irish coffee and some imported chocolate. It just felt good to get up and do something.

And the chips came out surprisingly well. Keeping the temperature of the oil as close to 375 degrees as possible turned out to be the single most critical factor in getting a good, crunchy chip. Since I was unable to make each slice precisely 1/16th of an inch thick, there was some variation in crispness, but that was O.K. Lack of uniformity is always a good thing in my book.

We never did get back to the game. At some point this morning I guess I’ll click on Yahoo News and find out which patriotically named team carried the day, and which Eastern seaboard city erupted in jubilation. But first, I gotta go take a dump.

Here’s a poem that I don’t think I’ve posted here before. (If I’m wrong, please let me know and I’ll put something else in its place.)

A pile of shed
garments on
the hardwood floor
rising in layers
of ever thinner
firmament,
                from denim
to lightest cotton
to breathless
silk &
a trickle
of sunlight
spilling through a crack
in the curtains.
                        While
the prim unwrinkled
bed, the generic nightstand
pinned under
a thick phone book
& the blank TV atop
a chest
          of drawers
all resist
engagement: nothing
to capture
the enchanted gaze
or even the bemused
appraisal.
              No stage
hand could stand
such inattention
to properties,
such utter abandon as
this room’s lone
occupant displays.

The Stone Coats? They’re us. They’re our boys and girls in Afghanistan, in Iraq, sheathed in body armor, driving armored personal carriers, tanks, flying A-10 Warthogs, firing shells made of depleted uranium that can penetrate almost anything. Sure, they get attacked, they get blown up. They sustain major damage to what are called the extremities. Many are shipped home in a vegetative state – one of those extremities being, of course, the head. Compared with that, the loss of a few fingers or toes, even an arm or a leg, seems like mere collateral damage.

One day a Seneca, who was out hunting in the woods, saw that a Stone Coat was following him; he was frightened and began to run. When he saw that the Stone Coat was gaining on him, he climbed a tree that had fallen part way and lodged on another tree.

Stone Coat came to the tree and stopped but he couldn’t see the man for he couldn’t look up. Taking a finger from his pocket he placed it on the palm of his hand. The finger raised up and pointed at the man. The man was a swift runner. He slipped down from the tree, snatched the finger and ran off with it.

(Jeremiah Curtin, Seneca Indian Myths)

Whose finger was it originally? The story doesn’t say. The man throws it back, and he and the Stone Coats make peace. In another, similar story, the man keeps the finger – this time liberated from a female Stone Coat – and employs it in hunting, with great success. It has the unerring ability to locate warm bodies. I guess it makes sense that the Stone Coats, the bringers of deadly frost, would each need to carry a heat-seeking device.

*

It was on a cold night at the end of January eight years ago that my friend Ben died. I remember the last time I saw him, two weeks before his death. He and my friend Chris had stopped out for a visit. I was shocked by Ben’s appearance and behavior. The old ear-splitting grin was still there, but six months of heroin addiction had taken a toll. When he rolled up a sleeve to show me his latest tattoos, his skin was very pale and cold to the touch. I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing and touching something that should never be exposed, some power object or juju.

Shaking his hand was a weird experience, because he never took off his gloves. They were those fingerless gloves that bikers wear, black leather. Though there was still strength in his grip, the gesture felt curiously passive, like shaking hands with a well-trained dog.

Aside from showing off his latest tats and piercings, I don’t recall that Ben contributed much if anything to the conversation, which was odd, because he always used to enjoy the kind of rude banter that Chris and I specialized in. After a half hour or so, he asked if there were somewhere he could take a nap, and I told him to make himself at home. He disappeared upstairs and didn’t emerge for six hours.

His death from an overdose two weeks later filled me with anger at his pusher, an erstwhile friend of mine. But it was never clear that Ben didn’t intend simply to commit suicide. Heroin dosages are notoriously difficult for users to regulate, especially in the first year of their addiction. The woman who was with him at the time – his other pusher, in a sense – did indicate that Ben’s last words to her seemed, well, like last words: “I just want you to know, S., I love you to death.”

There was no casket at the funeral; Ben had already been cremated and the ashes scattered around his favorite haunts, as requested. Instead, his parents substituted his electric guitar, which was covered with the decals of bands he idolized: Slayer, Anthrax, Sepultura. There were a number of thoughtful eulogies from friends and relatives, some dwelling on the abundant promise he had shown from his birth onward, and how on how much he had always valued his personal freedom. If this were fiction, you’d be justified in considering this detail an unforgivable bit of bathos, but the fact is that Ben was born on the Bicentennial Day – July 4, 1976.

His parents requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations in Ben’s name should go to some foundation for slow learners. That really bothered me. Ben a slow learner? He might have been a high school dropout, but he had always held his own with some of the keenest wits in town. Hell, if he had been a slow learner, he might still be with us. As with their decision a couple years previously to have Ben committed to a mental hospital for a few weeks, his parents showed plenty of concern but little real empathy.

But this is what we do, isn’t it? We look for answers. We assign blame. I have never completely gotten over the feeling that I failed him, that though I registered my strong disapproval of his heroin use, I never gave him the kind of stern, big brotherly lecture that he perhaps wanted. That August, when he first confessed his addiction, he had said something along the lines of, “Go ahead and tell me off. I know I have it coming,” and added, “I just don’t feel I have anything to live for, you know?”

“It sounds like you’re already your own harshest critic,” I had replied. But when he visited in January, why hadn’t I insisted we go for a walk – or at least confronted him about what he was doing upstairs all that time? Chris and I together might have been able to break through his formidable body armor. Who knows.

*

LIVING WILL
in the voice of B. D. M.
before his death from heroin at the age of twenty

Let them sting, whichever
words alight–let them bite.
Let their needles inoculate
against further venom. Go ahead,
tell me what I know
I need to hear, even
if it means piercing my ears
or plugging my tongue with shrapnel.
Spell it out: I’m a slow learner,
I don’t know my place.

Let the ink burrow in beneath the scabs.
Let each scar tell its own story–
I can fortify myself.
Let my flesh be a record of my passage.
Why save it for a marble comforter
& the rain’s devouring?
I can mortify myself.
Why restrict prognostication
to the crossroads of the palm?
I make myself my own mojo,
my funhouse mirrors.

Skin is more than a map, it’s
the very country. I wear
my landmarks. May
their power be mine,
spiderweb, serpent, skull,
may they rise from the graves
your clinical words unearth
& tell the world
its buried fortune:
sweet ferment of carrion flies,
spirochetes seething in the farthest
tributaries of the heart.

The latest page in my pocket notebook contains two notes. The first reads:

The loneliness of
abandoned/neglected/
forgotten deities

I jotted down this fragment of a thought three evenings ago. I have no idea where I was going with it.

The second is an observation recorded yesterday afternoon, as I sat in my parents’ kitchen eating a late lunch. (They’re away; I’m doing caretaker duty.)

Sitting in kitchen
staring out window
toward barn. A ladybug
crawls across window
through field of vision
just as a squirrel
climbs up the side
of the barn. They cross;
the beetle appears
twice as large as squirrel
and occludes it.

Everything that came between the first thought and the second – two whole days and nights – is represented by a single blank line in the notebook. What happened? Nothing and everything.

Three days ago the snow was soft and light. When I tossed apple cores out the front door, they disappeared into the yard without a sound. Then the temperature climbed above freezing and the snow softened and sank. Yesterday, my apple cores made plopping sounds. Then last night the temperature dove back down into the single digits. Today, apple cores bounce. (I eat a lot of apples.)

I sat outside between 4:30 and 5:00 this morning listening to the trees pop from the cold. The moon was just past full and shone brightly, making the tree trunks seem especially skinny and naked. Mornings like these have a beautiful kind of bleakness to them. I heard a deer crunching slowly along several hundred feet away.

Some Indians referred to January as the Wolf Moon, but for others, it was (and maybe still is) the Moon of Popping Trees. A story I found on the Internet gives the spotlight to Coyote rather than Wolf:

The Northern Cheyenne called the first moon of the year the ‘Moon of Popping Trees’ when the people hid inside their houses as the Frost Giant walked the land while striking the cottonwood trees so hard with his club that they cracked beneath the blows. The wise Coyote learned the Giant’s song and could sing him to sleep. So now the people hide inside when the Giant walks and the cottonwoods crack unless the singing of the coyotes assures them that the Giant sleeps.

Unfortunately, the coyotes have been silent lately, though their tracks are everywhere. So I guess it’s no wonder the Frost Giant is making his rounds.

But the Seneca, here in Western Pennsylvania and New York, had a slightly different conception. They referred to the frost beings as Genonskwa, “Stone Coats.” The Genonskwa are fierce cannibals, but because of their rigid clothing, they are unable to bend, unable to look up at the sky.

I thought of this as I walked up to the top of the ridge not long after sunrise, my boots making a racket against the snow. Golden light flooded the treetops, and the air was so clear that every branch and twig stood out against the blue as sharply as lines in an etching or frost on a windowpane.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is no joke; I know several people who suffer from it. Can you imagine how depressed you’d get if you you could never even look at the sky? Poor hungry Genonskwa!

Handyman here! That’s right. Nobody ever confuses me with a bird or a plane. Besides, who needs a cape? I wear this blue union suit everywhere. You know I’d change in a phone booth if I could only find one. I’m kind of an exhibitionist that way.

When I come knockin’, the trailer starts a-rockin’. I’m no good with power tools, though, and palm pilots abandon ship when they see these yellow fingers of mine, these fine fat maggots with a single buck tooth. A beer for my thumb and four shots of whiskey! Line ’em up.

Just look at the little bastards, tap dancing on the graves of diamonds they’ll never be able to afford. Bony cilia, asexual penises, refugees from a gorgon’s hair piece. Hey, have you ever known a stone that wasn’t cold?

Now look closely at their second pivot points. See how these knuckles make such happy little faces? Slit eyes, slit noses, slit mouths: masks that come to life every time a fist falls flat. Don’t worry, be happy! Slap yourself all over, babe. Over my dead body.

If you’re this beautiful, I must be drunk, I croon, peering now at my nails as if into ten blank screens. Can I get a witness? Hell no! I can’t even get a signal. This is a job for Handyman! Don’t let your evening be spoiled by a faulty wireless connection. Gimme five.

The formerly 20-foot-tall juniper tree (a.k.a. eastern red cedar) that had stood proudly erect beside my front portico has been bowed and humbled. The big ice storm back on January 6 left it canted at a 30-degree angle from the side of the house in a pose that strikes me by turns as humorous, ominous or obscene. I still do a double-take every time I come back from a walk and see the thing leaning out like that. It’s very disorienting.

The last time my friend A. stopped by, in late December, she said that the house reminded her of a ship. Well, now the ship has a figurehead. That’s what I was thinking just now as I glanced out at the juniper swaying in the breeze with snowflakes swirling all around: it’s like a headless figurehead, green and maternal – at least to the birds that take shelter in it each night. It faces southwest, more or less into the weather, as I suppose a good figurehead should.

But actually, A. didn’t specify which side of the house corresponded to the bow in her mind. In my own view, the house has two fronts, or at least two front doors: the one just mentioned with its portico on the southwest side, and the other that leads out onto the front porch, facing southeast toward the woods. Like the other main buildings of this old farm, it’s aligned with the ridges on either side. Thus, to confuse things still further, the front porch of the main house, a hundred feet away on top of a little hill, faces straight back in this direction – toward my front portico and the leaning juniper. An older, larger juniper tree leans out from the side of the main house, as well, though not at such an extreme angle. It faces southeast. Back behind it, on the same side of the house, is the small back porch off my parents’ kitchen.

In other words, though both houses have precisely the same alignment, the back porch on one faces the same direction as the front porch on the other. And though the houses otherwise look nothing alike, these two southeast-facing porches are almost architectural mates. Each house sits within a large, right-angled bend of the driveway that passes between them. Some combination of the internal arrangement of rooms and the external orientation toward the driveway seems, in each case, to account for our sense of which is the back and which is the front. The hollow itself faces northeast.

So it’s no wonder I’m still resting at anchor here on the old farm. I couldn’t begin to chart a route out of the harbor.

It’s 7:00 a.m., and something is coughing under my house. It’s a racking, consumptive cough – and no wonder, really, considering how dry and deep the dust is down there where no rain has fallen in 150 years. Perhaps it’s the porcupine that I saw last night in the top branches of the pear tree out back. I was taking a leak off the side of the porch around 9:30 when I heard the chewing, looked over and saw a slowly moving blob silhouetted against the sky. Puffed out against the cold, it was as round as a photographic negative of the almost full moon, itself hidden by a thick blanket of clouds. The storm was almost over; only a few snowflakes were still coming down.

Earlier I had gone for a walk, right at dusk. It’s easy going through the nine inches or so of light powder, and I’m well up into the woods before I stop my mental chatter long enough to notice the immense silence. I mean, it’s quiet. Surely the snow plows and cinder trucks must be out making their rounds in the valleys below? But the snow acts as a muffler, and I guess the low temperature – 11 degrees – prevents sounds from travelling very far. I love it when that happens. Suddenly I regret that I left my supper heating on the electric range. If I didn’t have to worry about the chile sticking and burning, I could walk all night.

Although this snow is exceptionally dry, the air’s been still enough all afternoon to allow some accumulation on the mountain laurel, which forms a dense understory throughout the oak woods on Laurel Ridge. The fresh tracks of a white-tailed deer wander back and forth across the trail. I’m reminded of something that happened many years ago on this very trail, less than a hundred yards away. When you have as many deer as we do, you wouldn’t expect that seeing one more under any circumstances could ever be too big a thrill. But this stuck with me. As I later wrote,

A doe stepped into the trail
in front of me one morning
after a heavy snowfall.
She was so close, I could count
the puffs of breath rising
from her nostrils: five.
She turned her head to look
beyond me, & slow as thought
turned it back. And when
again the thick laurel closed
around her, if she had dislodged
a single twigful of snow,
I would’ve seen it.

Of course, that wasn’t an evening walk but an early morning one. Mornings, I do see things differently, and perhaps a deer would, too.

This morning it’s drifting hard, so no more snow piled up on leaves and branches. But perhaps the sky will make up for that: the high winds promise fast-moving patches of blue and white and gray. I think of my friend Tom Montag out there in Wisconsin, taking note of the sky every day for five years in his Morning Drive Journal. It makes sense that skies would be like snowflakes, with no two exactly alike. In either case, it’s nothing more or less than water waxing poetic.

(envoi)

The sky after snow
speaks volumes denied to
the ground. You can walk
for miles without looking
once at your feet, like
this doe to whom I am nothing
but a tree among trees.
Like me: to myself
a single letter i. Or even
less: a diacritical mark,
say, an open quote.
Some minor detail
in whatever poem remains
when the world’s messy prose
gets edited out.

*

So whence this urge now to keep the prose intact? There’s so much more I could say about all this, and I have yet to mention the spider that I found out walking on top of the snow last week. Back in the middle of December I wrote about spotting a spider spinning a web. But that was at a relatively balmy 40 degrees; now it was 20.

This one wasn’t moving quickly, but she was moving, stepping with great seeming deliberation like someone walking on thin ice. A needle-thin abdomen rode high on delicate legs. Her small size and gracile build undoubtedly promoted the supercooling of body tissues that would otherwise be torn apart by the formation of ice crystals. I thought of the wood frogs that let themselves freeze solid wherever they happen to be when the cold strikes, their hearts suddenly working like fury to flood their tissues with glucose – a 200-fold increase in a matter of hours – even as the body freezes. In less than 24 hours the heart stops beating, all breathing ceases, and 65 percent of the frog has turned to ice.

With no more than a thin skim of fallen leaves over them, wood frogs depend on a good snow pack to survive sub-zero temperatures. I think of them down there, neither dead nor alive, with the snow for a sheltering sky. Perhaps if I had more time, I could write about the notion many American Indians have of a shaman as someone who can grow crystals in his chest and live. But I’d better get going if I don’t want to miss the morning.

If you’re going out, be careful
where you step. The wind
has been everywhere, erasing
its own tracks. Who knows
what the snow might hide.