by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 24, 2008

LOVELY, DARK AND DEEP

Imagine this....
....a palisade of trees on the verge of a pond, Frost's woods, "lovely, dark and deep." Just after sunset but before they fill up with night, when the air seethes cobalt with enough light to detail the birch's mottled bark, the pines' fletch lofted on doric trunks. The snow takes color like white silk dyed, the pond itself a low plain of blue plaster, the unlimbed sky above it salted with stars. The quiet has arteries flooded with your name....

* * *

Imagine this....
....a quarter-inch film of white horsehair plaster coats the lath nailed to studs axe-squared by hand that summer out of young white pines. The floor boards cover a root cellar where two bushels of potatoes and a basket of apples preserve in the dry cool. At the pond end of the cabin, flames purl over logs sitting on a footer laid that summer from stones hauled from the pond's lowlands; the smoke braids its way up a flue columned by smaller granites and puddings culled from the stone-breeding soil; the firebox is lined with more of the earth's bones. The skin of the cabin: boards salvaged, along with the nails. A woodpile cures in the cold. A bed, a desk, and a chair lemoned by the fireglow, kerosene-light pooling under lamps. Two windows on opposite walls blued by the simple evening.

With barely a sound, with more like an exhale's soft period, the snow comes....

* * *

Imagine this....
....standing on the pond's verge in a mist of snow, the clouds wind-thickened like unbolted cloth, the blue turned to a chalky glow from the dull reflectance of the earth covering itself, the flakes knitting like sifting pollen, and this moderate silence layered with the snow's hiss of accumulation, like salt sprinkled on paper. More sensation: the loose clack of branches catching high winds, your routine blood thumping in your ear, your breath's smoke ascending - and behind you the cabin, windows a double glazed yellow, the chimney signaling, and you knowing that in this moment balanced between ice and fire you are wonderfully empty, unpenalized by thought, there, just there, satisfied and without ambition.

* * *

In the city, things are different.

I like a snowstorm in the city because it forces the city to slow down, throws all its calibrations off. I like a really heavy snowstorm in the city because it defeats the cars and gives the roads back to the walkers. With schedules broken, people discover the dearer parts of the themselves, the parts usually put aside as frivolous or unprofessional

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