Some Failed Pictures from a snowy day

This morning cotton was falling from the sky and hanging in the trees. It's cold enough here that someone pronounced the word cotton as snow.










I stood in my son's room, trying to take pictures of the trees, their slender arms wreathed in white. Failure. Imagine if Jesus hadn't raised Lazarus or the water had stayed as wine? Out back, a group of trees were decorated in snow, like very tall and graceful women heading out to a formal ball.
















Winter is not cooperating. The flakes float down on a warmish winter day, muffling the cries of engines. On the street, someone is shoveling, running the steel edge of their shovel along the sidewalk. 















What if you and I were to get lost in the snow? Certainly, you say, it wouldn't be so easy. You know these streets so well. I would tell you that I am lost wherever I go, and you would point to a flock of crows in the arms of a tree or the way that our bush looks like a Christmas tree clothed as it is in snow. And I would say, let us talk no more of the snow. I want to tell you again that I am always lost. But you are no longer listening, a car has driven by playing a song that you like, or a couple is dragging their children across the ice on a wagon. "Look at that," you'd say, "such beauty."














Outside, the ice covered sidewalks are insulated by snow. In the white sheathed streets I begin to look for beauty. I begin to think of a cardinal flying on a white plain of snow; I think back to the slip of my foot on the stairs, wondering what it would have been like if my head had cracked open.What thoughts would come tumbling out upon the steps? Nothing of course but bits of grey matter. Why wouldn't all these thoughts come spilling out instead, on multitudes and confusing walks through fields of snow.














The people on the street are props in an uninteresting play. I see fields of white, trees that if only I could shoot from the proper angle, making a frame of the sky that I could turn into something beautiful. And then I see a flock of crows, and a series of trees that remind me that we are surrounded by beauty, like fish swimming in water, we temporarily forget that it's there.
                The bus is arriving soon, but I hear a small tweet from a large tree or bush, I couldn't tell you which because I don't know much about trees or bushes or evergreens or myself. I think how perfect it would be to capture a photo of a small bird's feet wrapped around a slender limb of a tree. Up above me, a small cardinal, startlingly red against the white tweets his aimless challenge at the snow. By the time my phone is out, unlocked and pointing up into the bush or tree or shrub, he is gone. And with that the moments of searching for beauty. I am on the way to the bus now. I have been found. It's coming soon, headlights like eyes to take me back to the land of the living.

These small things

You understand why I write you the most in November, just after the pale streaks of light have left the sky barren. I write to you furiously, near continuously about relatively inane things. I will tell you that I saw a pair of golden eagles, mated, soaring through the sky that morning, magisterial, burning through the sky like winged gods. 

END

What is going to happen to the cracker that I have left on the counter? Will the ants managed to dissect it, carve it up, carry it on their backs beneath the crack in my door, like day laborers building the pyramids in Egypt? You can see them turning around periodically, the ants, brushing antennae, and you can almost hear them saying, “hey, who the fuck is in charge here and where am I taking this,” a piece of cracker twice their size trapped to their backs. Or, more subtly, “did you order this piano.”

 

END

Last night I could hear the ice splintering in the trees. It sounded like a tree splintering, and at first, I couldn’t be sure if it was the ice splintering or the tree, and in fact, I have not checked. I have not looked out beyond the door. Perhaps the whole world is splintering, breaking apart, and so are we. 

END

This evening, I walked around the house with a long thin line of wintergreen floss held between my teeth, a habit that you’d always described as disgusting and broken me of. Now that you are no longer here I can spend hours with the floss held between my teeth, savoring the flavor of spearmint or wintergreen. It is only when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, ragged, foolish looking, with dark half moon’s beneath my eyes that I realize that you were right about the floss, and only the floss.

 

Hi. Where have you been?

 

The overwhelming fear of the blank white screen. Not page. NO. Pages are being ripped from the book of time, pages are falling in the wind, pages are drifting down lonely streets after the bombs have fallen. They float down the street, running like a flock of birds from an oncoming storm. But they are running from words, from pens, from typewriters and keyboards, off, off, into the still night, to lie quietly on the Atlantic Ocean, floating like children on the boughs of trees. There are pages that have existed far longer than any human being. I do not fear the white blank page. I fear the page with words scrawled across them, ideas, formulas, intricately drawn pictures of panda bears in postures of repose, pages with dragons flying across burning skies, burning cities, burning plains, burning the very pages that they are a part of.

Every person who has written more than a page or two in a journal must occasionally have this fear, yes? The fear that as you sit, or lie, or lay, on a divan, or a couch, or a chair, or a rooftop, or in the cold, on a fire escape, while the smoke of a stranger touches you from a distant room, the fear that your words will have left you, will have traveled to the Greek Isles, to the Spanish Isles, to the Falklands, to archipelagos and peninsulas and dammit, on a bad day, maybe just a part of the mainland that borders the coast, so brazen have these words that have left you become, reclining now, as you once were, in sun chairs, sipping margaritas and talking amongst themselves because you are no longer there to command them. They are vulgar and dirty. You miss them.

Inside this piece of writing is a message. It’s a clue. If you take very fourth word’s second letter and put them together at the bottom of the page, you will discover what I’m really trying to say. The presumption here being that we’re all special, and that words are just meant for us, when really, words are cheap, inexpensive, derisive, derivative, derelict, defunct, disenchanting bits of noise. The message, because who really wants to go through all that work is klaflaehalflf, which is just another way of saying that I am confused, which you already knew, and didn’t really need an elaborate message to figure it out. In fact, you could just sit down with me and have coffee, and I’d start talking about all the kangaroo road kill in Australia and wondering about the word marsupial, and the little pouch that holds in the babies, and you’d quickly excuse yourself, citing friends you’d just met online who were in imminent need of your presence. I understand.

In the reflection of the mirror lies a painting. The painting is of time, and a clock, and a man riding on horseback shooting at what appear to rabbits. I do not like the painting. At certain hours, I don’t like anything. It’s not a flaw in my nature but a flaw in nature itself, everything becoming so damnably unlikeable all at once. What are the chances? Apparently not so slim as it happens at least once a day. I do not know the man riding on the horse shooting at animals that are probably rabbits but could just be foxes, but I know that I am jealous of him, to be locked in such a scene, the lather of the horse, the blue smoke hanging over the valley, filling his nostrils. Now I am jealous of pictures. See how unlikeable everything has become!

Months ago I saw a mouse coming up the stairs in the middle of the night. We both ran away, terrified of the meeting. The next time I saw him he was dead, lying in the middle of a mouse trap, looking at nothing, or maybe just looking at death, who knows? Tonight a mosquito is buzzing around my head. He has bitten me twice in the forehead. I imagine, by evenings end that he will be dead as well. I do not know what this means about my relationship to the natural world, to death, to words, to the cemetery that we sat at right after we first met, to the words written on the gravestones, to the thin sunlight

wrapped in grey clouds, swaddled like a child.