Winter seems so wasteful, especially when it snows. So many artfully crafted ice crystals sparkling in the light, beautiful together and individually, and then they turn to sludge. God, why do you waste the snowflakes? So many brilliant microsculptures, thrown away on mush. I suppose He can always make some more. Still, though. I think if I made them, each one would seem precious to me.
In the afternoon, the snowy horizon blends with the pale sky and it’s hard to remember that winter will end someday.
And there will be warm nights again, hot fire wood smoke hamburger grill and summer skin, and running through fountains; the doing of the things of summer.
It is summer 1996 and I eat the mulberries with the bugs on them accidentally; it is summer 2000 and I sleep in a tent.
It is spring 2008 and I paint a turtle’s shell; it is autumn 2012 and I find bones in the woods.
It is winter 2006 and I wither; it is winter 2009 and I bloom.
But really it is winter 2014 and I haven’t painted in a long time; it is winter 2014 and I am cold. It is winter 2014 and God blows cooly on the world and I shiver, but it is the breath of God nonetheless; I’ll do my best to embrace what the season has to offer.
It is winter and the cemetery looks more forlorn than ever. Of course in this little town, the dead rest in the lot beside the Price Chopper. The stones aren’t ordered in any particular way; they’re just scattered like a careless handful.
Now outside it is all winter-black. Frigid-darkness, cold-hard-obsidian-darkness. The dogs bark at something beyond the windows; they pace worriedly and I am unsettled. Dogs know what happens in the insidious black. Then as they snuffle my face it seems as if they also know what happens in the space between words; the oblivion you trip into when you’re walking up the stairs in the dark and you think there’s one more step but there’s not and you fall forward. The spaces that are the contractions of silence as it labors to expel certain words from its womb and they come crawling, groaning into this world like they don’t belong here at all. Like they belong in some other existence entirely. And yet they come bloated, distended with a truth that uncomfortably satiates the need for honesty. Stupid words, go back into the silence! But they just stare at me blankly, zombie-words, completely unaware of their destruction.
It is winter and I wish I could sleep through it; it is winter and I can’t feel my toes.
I'd tell them, you know, if they wanted to know. I'd tell them all sorts of things.
