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so when in the space of not only minutes but snowdrifts you find yourself
in the grip of a bed of coals staring at you, daring you, taunting you to
forget your friends and jump over, or even to shuck the winter down coats
and the Thinsulate mittens and walk across, hell, walk in and stand and
yell and toss your hands up higher even than the flames shooting from the
kerosene-goaded wood, the sheet of flourescing carbon particles which even
computers can't predict, and then walk into the cabin, smelling so faintly
of woodsmoke that by comparison to the bonfire outside it smells of
anti-smoke, surrounded by friends and cards and beer bottles and wool and
the breath we used to speak and laugh slowly curling down the windows as
water drops to touch and wake up the hibernating flies who tumble off the
lamp and buzz languidly across the table, and the woodstove inside
crackling and steaming and turning the place into one huge placenta, the
"whole thing so damned amniotic" and once the press of bodies has lightened
a little, the shaking done, the lid lifted, and the foam sprayed off, the
people remaining sitting a little flatter, not quite so many bubbles rising
from the edges of the glass, you find yourself outside at midnight, wind
rustling around the hilltop and framing the stars in a numbness at the tips
of your fingers and sudden goosebumps under loose jeans and realizing you
can see seven Pleiades
and then they go inside, and it's only you on the hilltop in
cold. Take off your glasses and wrap your head in your scarf and
miraculously your legs get warm, cover your ears and your toes tingle
again--some truism here about sacrificing clarity of vision for being able
to stare at the truth longer, sacrificing crisp hearing for being able to
stay outside-- wander up to the highest point of the hill and find a
hammock there left from the summer, all dark wood and stiff rope in the
wind chill, and the stars through the tree branches seem focussed on your
face as you lie down and put on glasses and discover the sky crisscrossed
with dark branches and lifted in places by toothpick-point stars, and
somehow the gestalt, the picture of the whole unencumbered by horizon line
or farm yard lights has imprinted itself on my brain like a cookie cutter
made from a photo negative, so much so that an hour of moving furtively
through the fields leaves my thermostat high, leaves me untouched by the
wind, leaves my breath's fog so thick it's clear I've got a dryer running
somewhere in me, so that when I return to the cabin to the incredulous
cries of my friends "you aren't freezing?" I can merely smile and flash
stars through my teeth.
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