February 1st & 2nd, 2015


Svefn-g-englar, Sigur Ros, 1999

I.
I am pressed down by the covers with candles on every side.
These are my attendants. We all wait for the storm that I am
imagining as an army of white very very high up, in rings
around the moon, waiting to descend. The sky is a greenish
glow and the whole world seems to tighten itself in anticipation. 

When I drove home to celebrate Joshua's birthday earlier,
I noticed, as I always do, how things spread out as I enter
the valley. There are farms at the bottom of the mountain,

the biggest tree in Connecticut rests against the Farmington,
a vineyard stretches itself along the banks.

The fields were full of snow, and as I drove by my favorite
one, the one over which the moon is always hanging low
and swollen, I saw how the sky loves this field so much that
it mimics the color and texture.

Its clouds were gathered like an expansive gown,
or like curdled milk, or like what waves do to sand
at low tide.

In the diminishing light the white of the clouds
and the white of the field burned all the brighter. 

When I left hours later, Joshua followed me out
onto the porch in his bathrobe, talking to the last moment
without even breathing the way he did as a child

until I looked up from the ice I was navigating and saw
the waxing moon, nearly full, and silenced him with my
exclamation. He stopped to consider the moon, acknowledged
it briefly and finished his thought on the theories of the mind
we had been discussing.

His voice was very far away because I was caught up in the
light of the moon bathing the world in silver, turning
everything into a remarkable sculpture, gilding the
broken bird bath in the wild rose garden.

The sky vibrates with its frequency and I wonder
what scale it is singing tonight. The clouds have
cleared; the night belongs only to this startling revolution
of light.

No matter how many years I live beneath it, the vastness
of the sky still stuns me. 


II.
This morning I read Pound's Cantos III and tried to be
confused, but I think he was just talking about his life
in moments which connect to broader points in the world.

He was a man like any other human, telling a story
of great importance but insular allusions, reference
points which related back to him and then themselves,

umbilical cords - never free, both ends secured. 

The snow is falling very quickly now and I think this
storm will be bigger than anticipated. There are tiny
shimmering sounds all around - my pale hand reaches
absently to my cup of tea and my nails hit the porcelain
in the note of C,

I have turned on the humidifier again because
the heat from the old coils dries out this house, and my body,
a pressed petal, needs to be revived. The water turning
into to steam sounds like a trickling stream that is very
far away.

The furnace roars on and off and I imagine it as a huge
animal in our basement on whose back we ride through
this storm.

And Catherine, beautiful next door Catherine, whose
filmy lace curtain hangs like mist over the loveliest
lamp in her second floor bedroom, who has a small
round window in her entry way like one you'd find
on a ship,

Catherine scrapes the snow off the sidewalk in front
of her house in long strokes which sound like sand
paper dragged across rough wood, like the steady
shucking of corn.

The individual flakes, which are harder than normal,
I imagine their spires as ice, hit the glass of the window
in the rhythm of wind chimes, a percussive scale.

Earlier I misread a Pound line. "Silk tatters"
became "silt talkers".  Silt talkers. Silt, the smaller
sister of dirt and clay, the reduction of larger things,
the delicacy of granules. The silt of sound, the silt
of steam, the silt of snow against the pane.

The collected sounds of these smallest things creating
an ambient symphony as I sip my tea, as I wear my
fingers down against these keys.