year of fog

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

fog: Easthampton, MA to Grand Teton National Park, WY

 

testing materials: onion skin options, glue options

 

printing materials: traditional paper, or transparency mylar

 

folding template

 

testing the glues wasn't so helpful; secondary attachment (sewing) still required to attach onion skin covers to transparency text

 

all wrapped up and ready for post

 

silver stamped covers (onion skin)

 

(transparency text, accordion book format)

 

images against white background; when viewed aerially they resemble old film negatives

so brief, so fleeting

(quote from Issa, Japanese poet)

The snows began early, far earlier than they had been wont to in recent years. We were caught unprepared, our summer windows and white linen suits no match for the blanket that surrounded and engulfed us. The end of summer, suddenly, desperately, upon us, barbecues canceled and baseball tournaments declared no winners at all. As the days passed, meteorologists made promises of respite, reassured us that the abrupt change in seasons would only be temporary, but we could each feel it, deep in our souls, the entrance of winter.

Rallies on the ice were declared, community figure skating and warming huts, competitive tobogganing races to make up for the soccer and football we were denied. Miles of city streets remained unplowed in the ever-thickening blanket of snow; residents banded together in the early weeks, using shovels to laboriously clear paths for cars and buses, but as the snows continued, and continued, and continued, our energy for communal manual labor faded, withered away.

Those people for whom car access was a necessity parked in the city center, near major arteries that the city focused on keeping clear, but the rest of us resigned ourselves to skiing around town, snow-shoeing to the market for meat and bread, using sledges and sleds to transport children and shopping. The city buses were filled with riders whose cars lay buried under six, ten, eighteen feet of snow, and still it was just midwinter, we wondered when the deep freeze would begin and the snowfall would diminish.

For that is what we all began to hope for: not a thaw, not the return of seasonal temperatures, but a change to the deepest of the frosts, where it was too prohibitively cold for the snows to fall. We waited, waited for this, but it was not forthcoming. What had begun as an unseasonable descent into winter remained in stasis, never deepening into the coldest freezes, and more snows continued to fall.

While we had been unable to continue our citizen shoveling brigade, other communal projects besides the sports teams were undertaken and adopted with gusto. Entire playgrounds were sculpted out of snow, with twisting slides, tunnels, playhouses built in vast stretches of parks and parking lots. Without our cars, we joined efforts in transporting firewood, Christmas trees, any other bulky or heavy acquisitions for neighbors, operating as a human team of mules.

The schools had had emergency meetings, desperately trying to work out a school schedule when the entire academic term would have been forfeit to snow days. Administrators, teachers, parents all had different solutions; the children had strong opinions of their own, filled entire schoolyards with snowmen built in protest, had vast armories filled with snowballs to defend their descent into a winter of anarchy. Shorter school days were proposed, as the teachers and students were utterly reliant upon overcrowded city buses and skis; the school buses, still sleeping unused in the summer vacation parking lot, had never been unearthed from the snow.

Finally, a four hour school day was reached as a compromise, and school districts shuffled and changed classes and curricula to make up for the teachers who lived too far away to be able to commute to the schools. The children, who would have preferred the complete cancellation of classes until the weather stabilized, were despondent, but did eventually put away their objections and returned to multiplication tables, Euclidean geometry, international geography in classrooms whose windows were entirely covered in snow.

As the Christmas holidays drew near and passed into January, and the snows continued to accumulate, the joy and sense of wonder at the changed landscape began to turn into a quiet desperation. Alcoholism increased, couples argued more bitterly, brothers and sisters were unable to find common ground even against shared enemies. Preachers and therapists counseled patience, recommended meditation or joining Bridge groups, churches began hosting ever more regular pot roast dinners and bingo events. Community centers held film festivals on almost every evening, and enterprising citizens began creating community theater and choir groups, filled with the desperation of performers exhausted by the snows, presenting revues of South Pacific, The King and I, The Little Mermaid, anything, as long as it was an escape.

Our houses were insulated on all sides, a constant struggle to keep doorways clear enough for use, our front doors leading either into tunnels or to carefully built staircases of snow to the top of the accumulation in our yards. Some residents took to using upstairs windows, or those with balconies and porches on upper floors reoriented away from buried front doors entirely. For the infirm and elderly, dependent upon the efforts of others just to not become house bound, a charitable barter system was agreed to, wherein high school students could receive school class credit for freeing the doorways, for either delivering groceries by skis or for pulling sleds with those not well enough to ski to the market or the closest bus stop.

We persevered, but the exhaustion continued to beset us, as the days began to lengthen into spring but still the snows continued. We were not a people of the tundra, we were neither Inuits nor Russians; we wanted maple syrup and the early blooms of crocus bright against the snow; yet the trees were encased up into their canopies, the crocuses under so much snow that a thaw would take years before allowing their blooms to shine forth. Kindergarten classes made hundreds of origami flowers, entire grade schools cut and folded construction paper into brights beacons of spring, and the fields and yards around the city were soon littered with these paper offerings to Demeter, or these colored flashes of hope, winking where we desired to see blooms before being blown away or buried in the next storm.

And there was a next storm, and a next, and then we began noticing something odd. There were strangers among us: they looked somewhat as we appeared, but their skin glowed with the same white sheen as the gloss of fresh snow. Their hair was white, or the palest blonde, or a shining silver, it was hard to pinpoint which. They moved through the snow more gracefully, as if their feet were gliding upon skates, balancing where we would trip on rough patches or sudden cracks in the surface. They did not seem to congregate together in groups or to seek each other out, at least not in public, so it was some weeks before we noticed how many of the new arrivals there really were. When two would pass on the street they gave no sign of recognition, but we wondered, amongst ourselves, who they were, what was their intention.

They did not have children in the schools, they did not attend our churches or our amateur theatricals, they rarely shopped at the market and almost never rode the bus, moving along at their eery unearthly glide over the snow. Oh, yes, we thought they were aliens, come through some vortex from Neptune or some even more frozen distant galaxy. We thought they were ghosts, images only now able to be seen because the amount of snow shifted the visible spectrum and caused invisibles to materialize. We thought they were foreign invaders, come to take over a city which they had immobilized not with bullets but with weather. We thought they would colonize, enslave, or kill us, for they did not seek to become our friends, and we were afraid.

The religious thought that they might be angels, that the end times might be arriving in ice and not in fire, and yet still, these whitest of beings did not respond to either the offerings in their honor nor to the aggressions enacted against them; they would gaze, detached and serene, at whomever they encountered, and continue on. Whenever someone would attempt to follow one, to a home, a nest, a hive, a foreign ship, they were never successful, always became disoriented, separated from their quarry after a block or two, lost among other people or the trees.

And still the snows continued, until one morning when we suddenly awoke to clear skies, the first we had seen upon leaving our houses, as the snows covered the windows all around. Clear skies, cold, cold air, so cold our breath turned into icicles, but a wavering yellow sun over it all. And in the square in the center of the city, erected overnight: a carnival tent, as large as the high school gymnasium, constructed of shell-pink silk that we couldn't quite see through. Bustling about the carnival tent were all of the white, white visitors, meeting our eyes, smiling, inviting us inside. We were uncertain if it was safe, if it was wise, but the clear skies and wan sun inspired us with hope and confidence, and we entered into the mystery at the heart of our town.

weather
will flights be delayed: that is the question

reading
an astounding assortment of the avant-garde:
Reader's block / by David Markson
The curfew / Jesse Ball

carpenter's rule

Pause a moment. The nights grow long, stars fall to the earth, quickly, quickly, one after another bursting into flame in the unending evening of midwinter. Overnight the pond grows a skin of ice, frozen into the eddies and ripples of movement instantly seized, a photographic layer of film capturing the movement of just a moment before. Watch, watch, the sun glint on the new surface, becoming acquainted with contours grown rigid, surveyed by ducks who are nonplussed at the loss of territory. Pause, and in the moment of stepping out into the night sky to survey the approaching storm, be baptized by the shower of falling stars, and make a wish, make another wish, and again, and again, wishes grown countless as the days grow short.

The land bears no resemblance to its depictions in maps and fables. Before our journey ended, before our journey began, this was not what we believed in, not what we sought. There were to be endless fig trees, honey rich as summer wildflowers, cows with heavily lidded eyes giving milk overwhelmed by cream. We would learn a new language, a language with all the words and phrases that we had never learnt to speak in our native tongue, for we spoke with the heavy hesitations of unfulfilled promises and unrealized hopes.

The map had so many errors and ommissions, lines for routes that were dreamt of but previously untraveled, cities designed by rulers and builders and architects of great vision, but empty of bricks, stones, wells, cottages, railways, and settlers. We would plan our itineraries to arrive at an oasis, to discover the founders surveyed the location, looked to the horizon, took their compasses and rulers and spades elsewhere, although where elsewhere was, we never knew. We never found the promised moments of respite, the communities giving succour to the weary, for while they were implied by the map, they never materialized from intention and destination to reality. Still we clung to our Atlas, patched, faded, and misleading though it was, for there was no other path open before us, no other guiding hand shaping our destiny.

Our supplies ran low; we learnt to make flour from the seeds of foreign plants, eating those crops preferred by birds and squirrels, trusting that our desperation would not lead to sickness and poisoning before we reached the place we were destined to find. We drank water from foreign rivers, water from the melting glaciers, water from the hearts of cacti, and would have drank water from the rocks, but when we hit the boulders with our sticks there was no water for our efforts; in this, too, had we been misled.

Where there were no settlements, no towns, what we found instead was not the vast vacuum of wilderness but a great wild chaos of peoples, a landscape littered with towns which once existed many generations ago. Some of the wanderers we met avoided our gazes, retreated from our advances, although we meant no harm; we sought only information, stories about this land that was not as it appeared. Other groups were less defensive, met our eyes, and, although their language and our language were filled with dissonance and confusion, they showed us how the old old trees grew in the direction of streams and pointed the way towards water, they showed us how to break open a cactus as easily as a melon and drink its juices, they allowed us to rest under their wide white tents in the heat of the day.

To each of them we showed our map, we pointed to the stars and to our compass, but they all shook their heads. We were in a land that did not exist, and as it did not exist, no cartographer's trick could depict its contours and geographies, but it was many months before we understood this. Our bicycles, our horses, our carts gave out, for we were unable to maintain and care for them through the high mountain passes and during the summer rains, and in the end all we carried was our ruck sacks, our canteens for water, our grinders for flour, the leather of our shoes grown thin, so very thin, and cracked from the miles of wear.

Early in our journey we had tried to hunt, had sought to butcher and roast whatever we could catch or trap, but we soon learned that we were not hunters, that our ears did not hear the preternatural movement of hooves the moment before they moved, that our eyes were not quick enough for the shifting shadows before only emptiness remained. This we grew to accept, although we grew hungry as the land grew forbidding. The animals accepted the truce of our presence as we no longer attempted our clumsy stalking; with their acceptance we saw more creatures than had ever been reported by explorers. At dawn, feeding quietly, families of deer, deer of all sizes, mixed in with the trees of the forest, the smallest the size of a small terrier, the largest that of Hannibal's elephants.

On the plains were flocks of birds migrating away and towards, and we watched and listened, entranced, to their songs and movements across the sky, for hours. We wanted to remain with those birds, certain that among the hundreds of species there was room for us to fit in, that after months or years of careful study we would awaken one day, able to fly as easily as they took to the skies. After weeks spent camping under their migration, we learned how to decode their messages, and, with them, we turned to the South, away from the direction indicated on our map.

There was some hesitation about this change, for the map, flawed though it was, was all we had, and, once altered, finding our place again would be all but impossible. We were growing impatient with our journey, however; we wanted an end of it, to no longer be wandering in a place that didn't exist, and we believed the birds could be our saviors, could lead the way to our destination. We followed their course as the days shortened, their flights to a winter homeland, but on the third day we came to a river, a river swift, deep, and wide, much too large for us to forge or float across it with the tools at our disposal. Disheartened, we retraced our steps, back to where we had diverged from the map, and there, resigned, continued our journey deep into winter.

Not all of us survived; we did not know how to send one of our own on to the afterlife from a land that didn't exist; we feared their souls would be endlessly lost between worlds, and so we did all we could. We chanted and prayed, we sang and we cried, we left a coin in their mouth for Charon, and on ground that was frozen too hard for their burial, we scattered the ashen remains of a life lost before the destination was reached. There were days when I longed to be scattered in the winter winds, for it was a long winter, a cold winter, and we were unprepared; to have been a lost, wandering soul caught between worlds seemed a better fate than a lost, wandering person between worlds. And still, still we persevered, for there was nothing else for us to do but to continue to travel on, as our numbers and our hopes dwindled in the cruel winds of winter.

We lost so very many, and those of us who survived the ice and the storms were not who we had been when our journey began. I cannot say how we changed, for we could not fly with the birds; we could not speak with the other wanderers; we were of the same physicality as before; but the winter had permanently moulded the shape of our soul, fashioned us into a new people. We no longer relied upon our compass for navigation, we no longer consulted the lines on our map, for deep within, each of us knew the direction of our travels, and in one accord, with a renewed and unspoken sense of purpose, we continued to our destination.

We had stopped speaking, for we knew there would be a new language to speak upon our arrival, and with each footfall, with each lengthening day, our bodies absorbed the conjugations and declinations of a new vocabulary, until our very bone marrow was steeped in the language of our new life. And there, there, as the days began to grow longer and the ice melted into rains, and we knew that we had arrived, at last, into the land that was to become our reality.

It was not as had been foretold, it was not where the map indicated we would find it, but it was home, and we stayed. Here under the rain of a thousand falling stars we built our life, amid a chorus of snowmen we constructed our houses, deep in the heart of the stillness of the universe.

reading
Italo Calvino, Città invisibili

weather
Geminids showers meet sleet storms

up / away

The space was not quite large enough, the tree branches grown so closely together without the guiding hand of an arborist to shape the limbs into graceful balance and poise, and so what had been a cozy reading nook in the perch of a tree for a ten year old was uncomfortable in the extreme for one many decades older. Or perhaps it is the innate flexibility of children, composed of tendons and elasticity, able to adopt to the shape of a tree with no adjustment; whereas adults, calcified into their shapes as grown-ups, do not as easily become tree forms and eschew their humanity.

The leaves were the deepest green of late summer, not yet turned with the shortening of the days, but full of the imminent sense of loss that autumn would bring, the sap beginning to condense deep in the roots, allowing the leaves to suffer their fate, drying in the wind. Now, though, at this very moment of a late afternoon in the precious final hours of August, now the leaves are thick, glossy, an umbrella shielding the sun from the ground below, a curtain hiding those who seek refuge in the branches.

Climbing into the embrace of the tree had been fraught enough, no longer recognizing the footholds, no longer intuitively knowing the proper grip to pull away from gravity and into the shadow above, the instincts of youth having faded into sepia memories of the ease of movement. Perhaps trees assist children in their efforts, the branches and limbs making miniscule changes in shape and location to fit the palm of a six year old, the reach of an eight year old; but, horrified by the approach of an adult into these consecrated hiding spots of childhood, the limbs quietly, imperceptibly, change into unapproachable smooth planes, gracefully ducking out of the grasp of elders.

I had not intended to climb into a tree that afternoon, as no one of certain years has the intention to clamber upwards, for such behavior is viewed skeptically by general consensus. The lure of nostalgia excuses college students for exhibiting tendencies towards this juvenilia, yet past that point, opportunities and excuses grow thin. Desire wanes, as well, for the lures of the civilized world are strong, and the arms of an old oak tree cannot hope to compare with opportunities elsewhere.  I could not remember my last experiment in clambering up to find a space of quiet amongst the birds and the squirrels, and in all honesty, it was not a space of quiet that I was seeking now.

The fastest way for an adult to disappear is to become that is others do not expect to see; for while any child is constantly scanning trees for potential climbing spots and hiding spots, no one past their early years spares a second thought for what might lie in wait within a leafy canopy, with the exception of momentary seekers of bird songs. And so, while the tree physically fought my attempts to rest, quiet and unseen, within its branches, I had in the end been able to wedge myself somewhat securely in a join of branches.

Come nightfall, it would be safe to climb down from the haven, to disappear into the disguise of dark roads and the shadows around street lamps; with the arrival of nightfall it would be presumed that my destination would lie quite elsewhere, and all searching eyes would be successfully diverted. I had worked out a careful contingency plan for just such potential situations as this one, but I feared that my planning would amount to little more than a decoy, for there had not been time to take advantage of any of its benefits. Every undertaking has risk built into it, and every planned back-up scenario has behind it several emergency exits for cases such as the present. If the safe house was already occupied or if the car had been discovered, there are always, in any city, hotel rooms left vacant or houses empty to vacations or real estate agents. Into these pockets the transient can disappear for a day or two at a time, careful to stay away from the most orderly neighborhoods, watching the domestic patterns in pockets of movement, amongst students or immigrants, people with professional apathy to the presence of outsiders.

There are cities which are full of the ghosts of memory, places where the years of childhood have imprinted a street map and a geography that appears in no published source, and this was a city where I had spent long hours wandering in the shadows of commuters and homeowners, watching the school children released into the streets by the final bell and the shops change ownership and material offerings. I was back in home territory, if there is, anymore, a home territory, even though I had not set foot here in twenty years and was continually coming up against new buildings and disappeared roads. The skeleton of the town I once knew, the houses placed carefully back from the street, the trees planted at discrete intervals, the grid system, was still present: but over it had amassed the musculature and skin of strip malls, new schools, parking garages; disappeared from it were apartment buildings and small commercial outposts of sole proprietors seeking a foothold in the entrepreneurial dream.

Just enough of the old trees remained in parks and by rivers for me to have made one my priest's hole, but my choreographed dance out of the danger of the failed situation would depend on recognizing the landscape of the corners of a city hibernating from human attention. The sun began to set; my back ached in places where it had rested against foreign shapes, the discomfort of nature to a body evolved to an armchair and car. I slowly lowered to the ground, an exercise not in gracefulness but in fighting the increasing pull of gravity towards the outcome of a broken leg. All seemed quiet; no one was inconveniently walking a dog or looking up at stars, and I walked with the gait of one who passes unseen, a steady pace neither hurried nor slow, without limp or hop, keeping towards gathered crowds heading from work, to dinner, drinks.

It was towards midnight when I found the neighborhood I wanted, a conglomeration of apartments and small houses all jumbled in together, not yet gentrified into single family homes, but not so decrepit that even students stayed away. From a staircase between storefronts I found some of the vacant apartments over the main street, following the darkened hallways towards one near the back of the building, which would face the relative safety of a parking lot. The city was beginning to quiet down; there were fewer cars and fewer groups, and it would have been unsafe to be out alone, too visible and too exposed. The apartment doors were locked, doorknobs covered in enough dust to indicate disuse but not so much as to raise suspicion of one wiped clean by a handkerchief held loosely as I worked the deadbolt back and opened what would become my temporary refuge while waiting for the air to clear.

There was no established routine for contacting central operations for support; if anything went off, we had been trained for establishing ourselves in a pocket of safety and then quietly disappearing from the world. I had never needed to disappear before, and I feared that in this case it might be many years before I could slowly emerge back into reality. Each job is preceded by basic preparations that are, in themselves, not suspicious, and if someone must disappear, there is a clean-up crew that tidies up loose ends. I knew what that looked like; I had been part of the clean-up crew for an agent when things hadn't gone down at all well, and I regretted so many loose ends that I had no right to have expected in the first place.

It wouldn't matter; there would be a reinvention of myself within a matter of months, in Palm Beach or Santiago or Mumbai, and perhaps in ten or fifteen years I would have forgotten the city that I had first known, I would have forgotten the shapes of the trees I had climbed as a child, I would be another self, taking up a life as if it were all I had ever known.

reading
There but for the / Ali Smith

weather
skis! down coat! fuzzy boots! let the sun keep shining as long as it will!

30 Poems! chapbook

Now available: 30 Poems!, the chapbook, with any and all proceeds going to literacy education, through the work of the Center for New Americans. Lots of pretty pictures and a how-to description after the text.

There was a challenge in the month of November to write a poem-a-day -- which, with certain misgivings, I did. At the end of the month, the resulting [*] poems were formatted for a two-signature pamphlet, and digitally printed onto Bugra paper, with British Kraft paper covers. (My twin obsessions are onion skin and the lovely British Kraft paper. Both are crackly and shiny and splendid to work with.)

The poems were formatted to fit onto 2 sheets of 11"x17" paper, which were printed double sided, folded and sewn. The final size is 5.5" high by 4.25" wide.

Other details: really, send money to the Center for New Americans, or the literacy organization of your choice, and I'll send you a chapbook. Postage, materials and labor donated to the cause. Some exceptions apply[‡].

[*maudlin and sentimental]
[‡ exes are not eligible to participate]