Borrowed Time

The twined wire runs gracefully up over the white roofs like a thick-sewn seam: it follows the haunch and thigh of a giant, invisible model crouching over Division Street. It is the color of coarse-ground black pepper, and it shivers against the straight lines of the clapboard below. No human eye could bring that twine to focus, as it wavers against the straight-ruled paper of the walls. Certainly not in the shifting snow light.

---

You said you were warm, even toasty, with the table warmer turned to high: but the handsbreadth of shoulder I'd left exposed was cold when I came back to it. I rested my warm hands there for a count of three, while the blood and heat rose to my hands again, and I shivered: not for cold, but for way warmth runs to warmth and blood to blood. This is how we cheat winter. It's borrowed time, sure; but everything important is borrowed.

---

As a matter of fact I do count myself the king of infinite space, and my dreams are of shivered nut shells and glorious meats.

Snow

The checker at Fred Meyer was friendly, and judging by her accent, a native Oregonian like me. She spoke distinctly, and quite loud enough. But I could not assemble the sounds into speech. I stared at her. It's a familiar sensation, for me. My needle slips out of its groove, somehow: speech dissolves into a mere sequence of noises. I said, "I'm sorry?" and she repeated herself cheerfully.

Still just sound. "I'm sorry," I said, feeling old, fragile, and unnecessary, "I'm not following."

"Do you want these in double bags, or are singles fine?" she asked yet again. Still cheerful and patient. Part of the job, no doubt, is dealing with doddering, deaf, dementia-ridden customers.

"Oh, singles are fine," I said, "and you can leave the milk and the cat food out." The cat food was a boxful of cans. She duly lifted them into the little cart, and I added, "Let them run free!" You know, a little jeu d'esprit, to show that when I am tracking I am capable of playfulness. Not doddering at all.

Out into the parking lot, where the new snow was skipping on the pavement, twirling and eddying. Now I felt strong and vital -- I love the snow -- despite my inability to decode human speech. Sometimes the sounds just won't chain together, for me. It's nothing new. It's one of those human things, and sometimes I don't feel very human. More puma than human being: something that's used to the stillness of snow and the shadows under the heavy fir boughs. There are times, many times, when I don't feel all that invested in humanity. "The death of Jesus set me free: then what have I to do with thee?"

I watched the sky shaking out its white linens, the powder falling, and the wind made visible, its long white whips lashing and coiling on the street. But I was human enough to drive home, five miles per hour all the way, in a long line of worried cars pouring into the suburbs from downtown. We are not used to snow, here.

That was yesterday. Now, after all day at home, I am restless. "A caged tiger," Martha calls me, varying my cat-identity. I went for a walk in the snow at twilight: everything shadowy blue and white; and the snow cold enough to be light, thick enough to be good footing. So cold it didn't even get my feet wet. But now it's night, and I have not been out enough. I want something to catch: something to chew on and tear to bits.

Homage to William Blake

I spend a lot of time kneading oiled flesh, which means my hands are strong but soft. This is sometimes a bad combination. A day or two ago, after washing the dishes, I dragged the surprisingly hard crusted snow off my car's windshield with my soggy-skinned hands. Wasn't till I was driving that I noticed I had torn scraps of skin off from between my fingers. Ouch.

(I'm healed up now, in time for my weekend appointments. I heal like a young dog, fortunately.)

---

Roof

Los by starlight –
he lets his hammer fall
and it slides slowly down the ice,
its haft curling round its head; it moves
down the slant, the second hand
of an unfixed, unfixable clock, to skid
silently over eave and gutter, to write
self erasing circles in the space
above the snow. It falls
without a sound.

---

Much as I admire William Blake, I have to say that he was utterly and completely wrong about stars.

Three Ways from Winter

I

Jealousy wakes hungry after hibernation, quick to rage,
almost blind: its little bear-eyes caked with winter sleep.

Don't get in its way until it's stretched and eaten.
It will wander away into last years' leaves on aching feet.


II

Joy falls soft like snow,
turning trees to fishing nets

and cinder blocks
to intricate work in blue enameling.


III

Children still must be washed and fed.
Above the wrung cloths

stars spin on invisible wheels: sparks that fly
from the grinding of inconceivable knives.

Morning, with Crows and Snowflakes

Snowflakes gathering to the streetlights, and falling away. A blue morning, dark and quiet; the radio is playing softly: some melancholy country/soft rock crossover crooner. I can't quite recognize the tune, but the obsessive repetition of the refrain, and the anxiety conveyed by the ragged voice, feel quintessentially American. We can endure neither our ills nor their remedies, it says.

But it grows lighter, nevertheless. I can see the snowflakes now outside the spheres of the streetlights, drifting down, striking a repelling layer of air some three inches from the parking lot pavement, and bouncing up off it once, even twice, before settling. The flakes aren't dissolving immediately on contact, now. This may stick.

A dozen crows cluster in the air, and drift over to the tallest and nearest of the doug firs, settling on its crown. In all the mornings I've sat here and watched them, I've never seen them settle there, though it seems, to this ignorant primate, like the obvious spot. Is it the snow route? Half a dozen more join them.

The streetlights go out. The snow turns back to rain. Or are those fine flakes? More crows come to the moot: all the highest boughs of the doug fir have black ornaments bobbing at their ends. And then they all launch off and move over to the telephone wires northwards, along 62nd, where they get coffee and and joke and network and exchange business cards. Crisis averted. They've negotiated to discount the loans with the French and German banks.

And now, it's real morning. There are colors: green hedges, blue awnings, red cars. A surprising flood of light, now, coming through the thick cloudroof. Over there, our new white Honda Civic – new to us, of course, not factory new – glows as if it was the real source of all this light, the whitest thing in all this white world. We got it last week. We've become increasingly anxious about Alan driving the now ancient, can't-get-parts-for-it '85 Honda Accord, so the idea of getting the Civic was to give him the Ford, once we've spruced it up a little, replaced the struts and so forth.

When I finish my coffee I'll head on over to KCC for the morning sit. I went last week, too. It was nice to see everyone.

New snowflakes, daytime snowflakes, coming down now. A man hobbles past the windows, white flakes pasting themselves to his red coat. He comes in and takes his place at the special booth where Tosi ordinarily sits, the imperial seat, right by the door, between the old and new dining rooms. He's one of those men with ageless faces who forgathers with Tosi, talking in resonant confident voices in endlessly flowing Greek. Probably, like Tosi, in his seventies or eighties, though you'd guess fifties or sixties. All these men have strongly marked faces, and there's not one of them you'd mistake for American. They don't smile at strangers, for one thing, though they laugh and tease freely among themselves. Not even a flicker of recognition for me, though we've been sharing restaurant space for thirty years, and I must be as familiar to them as they are to me.

Off to KCC. Good morning! xoxo

Last Year's Rain

The snow falls like white shadows
in slow motion of last year's rain

if I were to let the tears start now
I don't think they would ever stop.

Solstice

---

We asked the sun to return, but she's walking in the skyfields far to the south, and ignores us. Her secretarial staff tells us we've made our request in due form, but there's no telling gods what to do: she'll come back in her own sweet time.

---

The waitress in the restaurant up the street hikes up her skirt and sits astride me to take my order, rocking absent-mindedly while she writes it up. Dismounts and pats my chest affectionately. To her I'm ancient, harmless, an old dog gone in the teeth. I find to my horror that my voice has gone high and quavery, and my hands shake. I'll never do massage again.

---

The sky goes iron-gray, then darker, darker, to ice-black, and the snow hisses, blowing in my face like fine white sand. It stings my face and my eyes horribly, but it does melt, after a moment, and runs down to clot in my mustache and beard. I shamble home in the dark.

---

The snow lies in thick drifts over the furniture and the books and the piles of paper. I lie down on couch, which stirs it up: it swirls high above me. I am tiny. I'm lying at the bottom of my grandmother's snow-globe. Of course. We've come to Grandma's for Christmas. A fire roars in the hearth of her big, square-built, Illinois house. Slowly the snow settles back down on me, in huge, comforting flakes. Warm. Getting warm at last.

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