Today was a gray dream that moved from snow and black twigs outlined with immaculate preciseness, to something else that wasn't quite rain. A damp dusk walk revealed silence crunching.
"It's rather like snow: in the beginning,
immaculate, brilliant, the trees shocked
into a crystalline awareness of something
remarkable, like them, but not of them,
perfectly formed and yet formless.
You want to walk up and down in it,
this bleak, maizeless field of innocence
with its black twigs and blue leaves.
You want to feel the silence crunching
beneath your ... shoes, but soon ...
the trees no longer bear sunlight,
the sky has dragged down
its gray dream, and now it's no longer snow
but something else, not water or even
its dumb cousin, mud, but something used,
ordinary, dull. Then one morning at 4 a.m.
you go out seeking that one feeble remnant,
you are so lonely, and of course you find
its absence. An odd thing, to come upon
an absence, to come upon a death, to come upon
what is left when everything is gone."
--
B. H. Fairchild, from "The Death of a Small Town," in The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998)
"It's rather like snow: in the beginning,immaculate, brilliant, the trees shocked
into a crystalline awareness of something
remarkable, like them, but not of them,
perfectly formed and yet formless.
You want to walk up and down in it,
this bleak, maizeless field of innocence
with its black twigs and blue leaves.
You want to feel the silence crunching
beneath your ... shoes, but soon ...
the trees no longer bear sunlight,
the sky has dragged down
its gray dream, and now it's no longer snow
but something else, not water or even
its dumb cousin, mud, but something used,
ordinary, dull. Then one morning at 4 a.m.
you go out seeking that one feeble remnant,
you are so lonely, and of course you find
its absence. An odd thing, to come upon
an absence, to come upon a death, to come upon
what is left when everything is gone."
--
B. H. Fairchild, from "The Death of a Small Town," in The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998)
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