The Right Thing

When's the last time you threw a pot, sketched out a painting? Time is short. And I couldn't agree more with TR, who actually swooned when we were talking about Messian, Quartet For The End O Time. We both love it. Opera, of course. Why didn't I think of that sooner? Listen to Robert Cray at midnight. Set out some buckets to harvest roof-melt. Read some essays from a pile of London Reviews B had brought over. The woodshed is almost empty, so I can finally get organized and start stacking the wood for next year, thinning out the trees close to the house. Just after dawn, second-guessing my every recent decision, I'd gone over to the back door, to put on rubber boots for a venture outside, to write my name in the snow, and I could see two young deer, yearlings, rooting around, looking for anything green. Went and got a stool, so I could sit and watch them; peed in my piss-pot, so I didn't have go out and disturb them. They're so dainty, so alert, they remind me of young dancers. They poke around the leeward side of trees, the windward side is still drifted in snow, and they perk an ear or flick a tail at every sound. The first birds are out, pecking at the sumac heads, as they've already exploited every other source of food. No demands on my time, so I make a large breakfast, potatoes, bacon, eggs, toast, and read about the history of eating utensils. Studying tracks and traces is a passion of mine, so in the afternoon I shoulder a small pack and head off down the logging road. Melting snow distorts everything, but you can still get the general idea. Blood is always an indicator, you know something happened. Also when tracks disappear without a trace. When a shrew's tracks disappear, without a trace, I always suspect an owl. A Snowy Owl can pluck a shrew from the snow as if it had never existed. The shrew would argue otherwise. A metaphor for anything hot and steamy, gutted in the cold night air. I don't have a handle on this, then ground stirs under my feet, and I shake in my boots. Two crows return for their mice. They don't have any expectation except that they got a mouse here, yesterday or the day before, and they might as well check back, to see if there was another one. I have mice lined up in the freezer like Mayan sacrificial slaves. An Olson line: "I set out now, in my boat upon the sea." It might not be the correct move, but it is a move, nonetheless, and I'm damned tired of marching in place. Back-paddling a canoe, to stay on a standing wave. Better to just get on down the river.