Via Negativa

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.