Old Bio in Snow

There’s always a snowstorm coming

and I’m always booked at a café

on the other side of the mountain

driving on bald tires to give another lecture

on Hegel’s vision

of the infinite whole

and at the last minute deciding to lecture on wind,

and snow, and their effects on discarded newspapers.

No, wait—this lecture

was about repeating the past.

There’s always a snowstorm coming

and I’m always booked at a café

on the other side of the mountain

driving in the dark

and I am insanely happy,

weaving along the winding cliffs,

careening down the other side of the summit

in a little blue car, parking, sliding a quarter in a meter

and bouncing off with manila folders under my arm,

my gabardine overcoat

flapping open like a hospital gown,

to give lectures on vision and snow and repeating the past.

And if they introduce me with an old bio

so be it. No need to mention the latest

gummy linguistic situation in words,

or my recent award

for laying on the rug

and staring at the lacy vacant spiderwebs

in the petticoats of a glass cupboard—no,

forget the laurels. What matters tonight is Time

and blizzards

and saving on your next purchase

with a coupon from your unconscious—

Now, snow.

That form of water which haunts.

It follows you indoors in obedience to air

until it feels fire, then it looks for a place to lay down

with fire, to then elope with earth, to move slowly to the sea.

I just thought I knew something

and light was pouring through me onto the floor—

but everything shifts, one moment

to the next, and leaves

a dark stain where it was.

I remember something, then panic sets in.

A metaphor no longer

holds like it used to—I master

no single existence in the past—yet here I am,

still with my name and mutant face.

It’s not real they say, the past.

Even if an ember is burning holes clean through,

cherries dropped from the tips of cigarettes, fallen

many years ago—back before they put phones in pockets

and people wrote numbers all over the stairwells

and no one stopped reading a book

to take a picture of one of its pages—ridiculous.

Instead, there were long uninterrupted hours of reading

and smoking and crying. Your own eyes wept

as they do now—though, looking back,

you’re not even sure who was weeping and who

was watching the weeping. Time is also about waiting

for an almost imperceptible change

in a single tear. The mother’s textured silence.

Disturbed neighborhood kids coming together in the woods

to echo their own households.

It’s never really about the why in crying, is it? I mean

in terms of narrative

it just comes, resembling meaning

like an old bio, resembling snow, and holding

in your mind the object of a spruce tree

at whose base a kitten is buried wrapped in a tea towel.

And everywhere

there is a white soil coming,

carried sideways by wind, and down by gravity,

a pale inflection on its many cold lips.

And it doesn’t need to know where it came from,

to know it is part of the whole

and it is snow,

and it falls on your face

and ends.