Another Blanket

Got up because of the extreme quiet, four inches of powder, beautiful in the porch light. Stay up, start a fire, start melting snow toward a bath. Mid-morning a break in the cloud cover and the world is dazzling. Brought a load of river sticks and a stump home, last time I could drive up. Log billets from the river, for the most part, are a uniform gray, rounded edges, unidentifiable except maybe by weight, wet, all bets are off. This one is heavy, slightly wet, splits easily, a maple of one type or another. I rick it inside to dry. Stupid robin outside, should have stayed in South Carolina for a few more weeks. He's puffed up like a body-builder. Looks funny. He's watching me through the window, cocking his head. I don't have any bird-seed but I take out some tabouli. This bird is used to being fed. A couple of nuthatches appear from the under-story. Tabouli, who knew. Continental Drift, birds have a long and collective memory. I spend so long, looking up a word, chasing definitions, that I forget what I was longing for, get a drink, go to my desk, try to reconstruct events. I've learned to make a note, I keep a folded piece of paper and a pen next to me at the computer for this very reason, but I sometimes forget to make a note of where I am, jumping up to check a word or fact. When I'm home, I occasionally jot something on the same paper. I keep a pile of these sheets, the extra sheets of paper that go through printers and usually get tossed, fold them in half and have four pages to make notes on. I started saving them, for years I used them to start fires, but now there's a pile of them under one of the dictionaries. I bury myself in paper. Blue-grass on the radio, very low, it becomes a drone; it's astounding to me, the way I focus my entire existence toward the three or four hours I write you. Now, of course, it's again critical. Write myself out of a box. Is that cat dead or not? Clouded over and started snowing again. Excuse me, I'm distracted, the whiteness of the whale. When you know someone well, meaning accrues, it's like mold, it accumulates. You might see it as a patina, just a gloss, but it might be more than that. A scream in the dark. Something almost tangible.