What we love about snow is its accretion: boughs, branches laden. It weighs; tamps down a wheedling winter; sets all to wait. We spend minutes pushing it around; months. Yet, funny thing with snow—you can only disperse it, never transmute it. For that, greater powers are needed.
I glide through on my skis; I think about the stuck and unstuck I do. My lashes close, then open. The windshield wipers push a ledge of snow back and forth, in a V. The clock faces push a V around, too. In all of this, the shapes repeat. My breath—it sticks; un-sticks; stacks onto the breaths before.
For every inhale, silence itself is apportioned—a ration of the chest, the heart, the soul.
If I come unstuck here, that’s alright. That’s alright, this whole scene seems to say. Spring’s creeks are muffled; the world’s sealed up its seams.
That’s alright.
There’s this: my exhale; another return of the line that makes marks against the white. Stack these silences, one on one on one. Push your breath in and out. You cannot change; only grow, flake to flake. Live to breathe and live to wake.
The sum adds here. This waiting in the woods, this tree. The refrain; the wind that gives your body shape:
You are she. You are she.
