Thursday, Chickadee, Warm Room, Nuthatch, Home Safe, Robin, Trees Spun of Glass

I am baking chicken for dinner and the house is filled with the golden smell of it. Outside the trees are strangled in glimmering glass and when the sun hits the branches there is a crystalline cursive to their cries for help. They've written to the sky and the sun lights a reply but the air is still freezing and the bath of hopeful glow is deceiving.

All the words to and from Tuscaloosa are slowing-down. I have taken the story to those who didn't know and heard enough to know that what I know is what most know. Alex was a riddle in certain ways and to love and respect him meant you let him, in some respect, remain that way. You didn't ask his age and you didn't probe about his health. There was a solitude to him and he could fill a room with friends and company and keep that solitude intact.

I am home for the week, for the weekend and planning a strategy for knocking out my story and trying to feel completely well again. To my right, sliding glass doors lead to a roof with the leftover whiteout of snow and on that winter's page, there is the sanskrit of bird feet as they visit and revisit the flat of peanuts, raisins, melamakorona that I have left for them. In one day they have made short work of the offering and thinking of them in the bitter cold, I am glad for what fat I can swaddle them in. For myself, I miss my summer arms, the tone of them and the way I was consistent in my attempts to keep strong and driven. M is so great about me, so accepting and so celebratory that it is easy to lie down and rest in all that regard. But I feel noodly, all wrong for the opening of the pool in May and dreaded swimwear it implies.

In the time that I've been writing this post, the cool breeze has danced feathers of ice over the melting roof-snow and what was liquid just moments ago is plumes of ice-panes and a reminder how deep runs this cold.


Ice Storm
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being…
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister…

I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body…

It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.

Jane Kenyon