Imagine this....
....a palisade of trees on the verge of a pond, Frost's woods, "lovely, dark and deep." Just after sunset but before they fill up with night, when the air seethes cobalt with enough light to detail the birch's mottled bark, the pines' fletch lofted on doric trunks. The snow takes color like white silk dyed, the pond itself a low plain of blue plaster, the unlimbed sky above it salted with stars. The quiet has arteries flooded with your name....
* * * * *
Imagine this....
....a quarter-inch film of white horsehair plaster coats the lath nailed to studs axe-squared by hand that summer out of young white pines. The floor boards cover a root cellar where two bushels of potatoes and a basket of apples preserve in the dry cool. At the pond-end of the cabin, flames purl over logs sitting on a footer laid that summer from stones hauled from the pond's lowlands; the smoke braids its way up a flue columned by smaller granites and puddings culled from the stone-breeding soil; the firebox is lined with more of the earth's bones. The skin of the cabin: boards salvaged, along with the nails. A woodpile cures in the cold. A bed, a desk, and a chair lemoned by the fireglow, kerosene-light pooling under lamps. Two windows on opposite walls blued by the simple evening.
With barely a sound, with more like an exhale's soft period, the snow comes....
* * * * *
Imagine this....
....standing on the pond's verge in a mist of snow, the clouds wind-thickened like unbolted cloth, the blue turned to a chalky glow from the dull reflectance of the earth covering itself, the flakes knitting like sifting pollen, and this moderate silence layered with the snow's hiss of accumulation, like salt sprinkled on paper. More sensation: the loose clack of branches catching high winds, your routine blood thumping in your ear, your breath's smoke ascending -- and behind you the cabin, windows a double-glazed yellow, the chimney signaling, and you knowing that in this moment balanced between ice and fire you are wonderfully empty, unpenalized by thought, there, just there, satisfied and without ambition.
* * * * *
In the city, things are different.
I like a snowstorm in the city because it forces the city to slow down, throws all its calibrations off. I like a really heavy snowstorm in the city because it defeats the cars and gives the roads back to the walkers. With schedules broken, people discover the dearer parts of the themselves, the parts usually put aside as frivolous or unprofessional because they are so busy answering the whip-filled voices of corporate self-discipline, echoes of parents and necessity.
The city may be paralyzed, but not for long. The legions of trucks begin the retaliation, like Hannibal's elephants -- the plowing, the hauling, the salting and sanding. Cars are buried with indifference, driveways barricaded with a sneer, crosswalks mounded with mountain ranges. Nothing must hold back the commerce of the city, nothing must allow people too much freedom.
Where we live, the assault grows very noisy. The Star Market parking lot, a vast negative designed for parked cars and drag racing, gets the first assault wave, with half a dozen piss-yellow front-loaders dropping their buckets like heavy unfriendly boots on the front porch stairs, and then starting their plowing rounds, ripping through the snow as if it were mere unnecessary lace. The yellow minions are joined by one or two real snow plows, huge squat dumptrucks with road-scarred blades attached to their bodies through a cruel array of hydraulic hoses and mechanical arms. Together they pile the snow in one enormous barrow at the end of the parking lot, and for most of the night I can hear the thick drone of their engines, pocked by the annoying squealing eee eee eee of their back-up warning devices. Even in my sleep their endless harrowing scores my dreams until the dream-self is scraped down to black asphalt throwing sparks as the metal blade nicks the surface like a flint.
Even worse, the overflow parking lot next to my building, usually left for last, meaning one or two in the morning. One of the front loaders pulls into the lot and sits there for a few moments, exhaust pipe chuffing its diesel exhale, while I can imagine the driver girding himself for snow battle like some knight inspecting his armor to make it sure it covers the proper soft body parts. Then he drops the bucket with a bang that shakes the house and winds his engine up to a battle-speed whine and commences -- first the forward stroke with the sound of a hot iron sizzling a wound shut, then the eee eee eee of the Psycho shower scene as he backs up for another run. When the snow has finally been slain, he withdraws, leaving behind a corpse of shattered quiet. If the machine could snicker, it would.
Whatever beauty and frolic the snow brought has been cut and buried. The city's life must go on, the routines must be salvaged, people must not be allowed to experience release and relief, no space must given for enlargement of the spirit, and so the logic of snow removal triumphs, the city made ready again for commerce, exchange, entrapment, dismay. In short, the city must act as if the snow never happened, and it expects no less from its subjects.
* * * * *
Imagine this....
....a moment freed from anxiety, your original face entitled to rise, the arteries and alveoli as tack-sharp as at birth: even before the trucks come, even if you can't have a cabin, this is possible with the first-snow raining down its crystal manna, infusing the air with its brisk reminder to breathe long and hard, treasure your warmth, and leave space for as much undoing as possible....
(March 1996)