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Last night I heard your voice, mother, The words you sang to me When I, a little barefoot boy, Knelt down against your knee. And tears gushed from my heart, mother, And passed beyond its wall, But though the fountain reached my throat The drops refused to fall. 'Tis ten years since you died, mother, Just ten dark years of pain, And oh, I only wish that I Could weep just once again.

A BB gun. A model plane. A basketball. A ’lectric train. A bicycle. A cowboy hat. A comic book. A baseball bat. A deck of cards. A science kit. A racing car. A catcher’s mitt. So that’s my list of everything that Santa Claus forgot to bring.

At 1:03 in the morning a fart smells like a marriage between an avocado and a fish head. I have to get out of bed to write this down without my glasses on.

All my undone actions wander naked across the calendar, a band of skinny hunter-gatherers, blown snow scattered here and there, stumbling toward a future folded in the New Year I secure with a pushpin: January’s picture a painting from the 17th century, a still life: Skull and mirror, spilled coin purse and a flower.

A tang approaches, like the smell of snow. Illness like a color deepens— pale gray, thick-in-a-cloak gray, secret coat silk, and finally the weight of rough pelts heaped on the bed. The last enchantment of the day is tearing pages out of a book. The paper soft and thin, like falling asleep (a hand backstage smoothing my hair: the school friend, Lakamp, became an undertaker) My baby laughs to rip the pages. Stays by me, does this damage. The tearing moves like voltage through my own hands. Oh mother skimming fever I need him to linger are you still happening there, in your body? I just want to lie at the edge of breaking. Yes, I am still backstage, here in my body. The baby pulls out another page— leaving him would come this easily. I will bind myself to the thinnest sounds, the feather coming out of the pillow. Please keep ripping up the words. Please don’t need anything from me.

The backyard is one white sheet Where we read in the bird tracks The songs we hear. Delicate Sparrow, heavier cardinal, Filigree threads of chickadee. And wing patterns where one flew Low, then up and away, gone To the woods but calling out Clearly its bright epigrams. More snow promised for tonight. The postal van is stalled In the road again, the mail Will be late and any good news Will reach us by hand.

Our substitute is strange because he looks a lot like Santa Claus. In fact, the moment he walked in we thought that he was Santa’s twin. We wouldn’t think it quite so weird, if it were just his snowy beard. But also he has big black boots and wears these fuzzy bright red suits. He’s got a rather rounded gut that’s like a bowl of you-know-what. And when he laughs, it’s deep and low and sounds a lot like “Ho! Ho! Ho!” He asks us all if we’ve been good and sleeping when we know we should. He talks of reindeers, sleighs, and elves and tells us to behave ourselves. And when it’s time for us to go he dashes out into the snow. But yesterday we figured out just what our sub is all about. We know just why he leaves so quick, and why he’s dressed like Old Saint Nick in hat and coat and boots and all: He’s working evenings at the mall.

Winter advances leaving its white tracks bounding over the hills I climb each December to get to the river where velvety shrews, voles and squirrels crisscross in the snow, their claw marks reminding me of the exquisitely complicated pattern I watched an Ojibwe bite into a birchbark. (Art as old as the world, the woman said to me.) • In the origin myth of Eskimos the first children sprouted from fertile soil and, like tender plants, stayed rooted there, being nourished by the earth. No one knows how one boy and one girl grew into adults able to walk into the world, able to meet and marry. • Each tree was a letter once. Pagans spelled out their secrets by threading the proper leaves in proper order— Birch tree, Heather leaf, leaf of the Ash. A language you could hold in your hand. Words that quivered, turned color in the fall, that could be taken back, burned in regret. Lonely winters when there was nothing to say. • From a north window, the choked river, a slippery crack of light. Does my neighbor notice me crouched down, my bare fingers exploring the deer tracks I've found, some chips in the ice? I wave once, but she stares absentmindedly into the cold. Pure imitation. The great bored glacier of her face. • How many have known the endless emptiness inside an ordered room? How many, a silence so profound, inside and out? • I turn, startled, as if someone dogged my steps. Nothing. Midday sun scatters down among sapling ash. At my feet, birdtracks wherever I look. The only ciphers of the day. My footprints merge with the ones laid down here, my whole body, heart, lung, muscle, leaving its trace. • Everything that moves leaves a story. No story can exist by itself. • What am I to the wolf and the rabbit and the fox? To the songless birds balancing on branches? To the solitary pines dipped in frost? • First the trough where it plowed forward, then the wide belly-slide down the bank, the musty scent-post, the scat, the smooth hole where the otter slipped through a window in the ice. Scattered all around, a wolverine's fresh tracks, the slashes where its claws raked as it slid to a stop. Stiff gusts of wind kick up around me. Twigs and bits of debris soon mar the tracks. Before long, the sharp edges will begin to slump. By early next week, everything will be erased, the immaculate snow unable to keep the shape of a single creature.

There is a moment before a shape hardens, a color sets. Before the fixative or heat of   kiln. The letter might still be taken from the mailbox. The hand held back by the elbow, the word kept between the larynx pulse and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air. The thorax of an ant is not as narrow. The green coat on old copper weighs more. Yet something slips through it — looks around, sets out in the new direction, for other lands. Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed. As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road: it cannot be after turned back from.

He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people He has plundered our— ravaged our— destroyed the lives of our— taking away our— abolishing our most valuable— and altering fundamentally the Forms of our— In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. —taken Captive on the high Seas to bear—