I can see the wind. Not by the way the tress blow, but in the thousands of snowflakes caught in its stream. The flakes mark the path and outlines of the elusive, previously invisible wind. Unknown made known. An expedient traveler, sweeping over entire regions, feeling everything, touching all, form-fitting it, then vacating. Gone, never looking back, an impersonal, soulless force. Or perhaps it has incredible depth of soul.
Cottonwood trees in the backyard, testament to 20+ years of persistence, rising into the air in proud defiance, like streaks of thick, black paint slashing through the vacuum of blankness. Boughs, budding with spring, but still naked, scratchy winter tress. The slash trunks fork into sections, begetting branches, then twigs, all making a haze of a tree. It becomes so thin that the tree dissolves into the sky, meshing into one, sharing their being. Branches, reaching upwards, always clawing for sky and sun, are sagged, drooping in the middle. Shaking as if from cold.
The white-out sky allows me the vision of only close trees, a copper wind sculpture, a tree house, a young tree, green, its reanimation interrupted by snow. Evergreen trees, fringed with powder, dark forest green. Blowing in the wind, like a woman dressed in rags, hair everywhere, clutching her collar to keep the cold out. Everything swaying to the will of the wind, trying to retain equilibrium, a constant power struggle.
The white-out sky is a canvas, where only what I see is real. Anything beyond the white has passed away from my sight, away from memory. Away from existence. Anything beyond the white is of no concern to me. There is no life beyond the white, just sleepy, silent nothingness. Uninhabited. Dark mountains at twilight, in a deep snow, haunting moaning wind.
I laid awake far into the mourning hours,
transfixed at the scene outside and above my bedroom window.
A crunchy, uniform coating of nieve. Nevada.
Falling like atomic ash, falling eerily, silently, as if the entire world had been put on mute. The silence of deafness. Oppressive, snow globe silence. Powder, glittering like shards of hardened lightning.
And this entire scene was illuminated by an amber-marmalade light.
Sepia, like a photograph bleached with sunlight. This stale, dingy light is the light from this stagnant city reflected off the cloudy sky, back upon itself and through spaced by the snaggle-thoothed edges of the snowflakes.
Snow. Is. . . . . Inexpressible.
For hours into the nocturnal cycle I gazed into the acrid tangerine light of the falling snow. And it gazed into me.
The next night I eagerly clambered into the same bed but the light wasn't there. Only chalky, cold darkness.
I take out an old Bible and open it. Though I don't believe, I find it interesting to read. Bibliomancy:
Will I soon be gone?
You made my life short, so brief that the time means nothing to you.
Human life is but a breath,
and it disappears like a shadow.
Our struggles are senseless:
we store up more and more,
without ever knowing who will get it all.
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