The intimate mathematics of gravity on the body that has not slept

This winter more than any other I can remember, I've redefined my relationship to snow, and to walking in it.


I haven't been sleeping properly this season - it's either been over-long and oddly ineffective (waking up with every muscle thoroughly drained of energy) or it's been totally absent.

I started a poetry series of little things that I write exclusively when sleep-deprived. I wrote another just now. Last night I couldn't sleep. I sprawled out and flipped through sundry books; I took other books off my parents' shelves (Connolly's selected writings were too intense, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - with another person's marginalia - was much too compelling); I paced; I looked at things. Eventually, I took a walk in the woods that surround may parents' house. The moon wasn't out, but the snow gave off the most gorgeous ambient light.

Someone had been cross-country skiing up there. I wonder how they were able to avoid branches.

I listened to the trees creak. I held onto their trunks when the wind made them sway.

I rested at the top of the hill, determined to wait until I heard an owl. I did.

And as I started to return home, I saw a coyote. It looked at me. I looked at it. We parted ways.

I came home and thought about things. Earlier in the night, I had heard my father murmur that my mother is so beautiful as he was falling asleep. What a privilege to grow up amidst a love as deep as theirs.

Who could sleep in the face of that?

"Old Suzy made me stand where I was and came over and brushed all the snow off of me."

About a year ago now, I wrote a poem about Thumbelina and the early days of my parents' courtship.  Today, I read this remarkable post by my beautiful friend Sarah.  It's about Champlion's General Store - the place both my mother and I worked in our early twenties, the place my parents lived when they first got together, the place I learned how to start a fire in a woodstove, and the place I was cured of many, many ailments.


I'll be thinking of Bob a lot through this season.

It might be time to revise that poem with some detail from the Daily Campus article.

the hectares of my heart

I look at this picture of my mother and I think she is probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.



Today my mother has officially spent half her life as a mother. She was 29. She had lived in Hawaii and Tucson and sundry locations across the Northeast. She had been married and divorced and married again. She and my father owned a house in the middle of a forest they loved. She had found a career in a field that utilized her degree (granted, that field did not and does not pay a living wage). She had and has great legs.

It's hard not to measure oneself against that.