The snowy white parallelograms of the rooftops are brighter and harder than the sky, which recedes uncertainly behind them; gray, maybe, or blue -- the color of a heron standing in a lake. I have been walking on the packed snow, so I am sensitized to the minor variations in hue: you need to pay attention on the half-packed snow, because the clumped and battered surface is uneven, and the variations are hard to see; and yet it hardly matters, too, because it's still malleable, hardly real terrain at all. My footprints remade it as I went.
In places it has packed down tight and turned to gray ice, though: there will be more and more of that. Half of Portlanders don't shovel their walks: many of them don't even know you're supposed to. It may be ugly walking for a couple days, when this finally begins to melt.
Last night, a full moon on the unfamiliar snow.
This cold and immobility stops up my heart and clogs my mind. I don't think I've had one clear, definite thought or feeling since the solstice. My longing for rain -- rain that falls and flows and doesn't freeze -- is intense. I want to remake my life and become a better person, somehow, but nothing really moves or changes. It's all a cold whiteness, slowly going to gray.
5 comments:
I feel the same way you do about rain, but those flannel skies with city-light roses blooming at the horizon, that slapping wind, the crystals hanging high--this works too. Focus, dear. It's the SUMMER HEAT AND BRIGHTNESS that we must rail against.
Yes, rain. I am with you there (it is snowing outside, huge wet flakes). But remember, winter is short. It will be over soon.
Be grateful you don't live in Saskatchewan, where snow & ice start in early November and end in April.
I am, believe me!
Yes, well, as a Southerner in the N'oth, I know whereof you speak! Especially today.
Although I think also of the larger thing you mean and Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" sweeps in, those last two lines.... We could say them every day like a prayer, and it might be good for us.
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