Alice B. Fogel

What hand opened the door, I don't know. No one lives there in winter. And I don't know if it was for entrance or for exit that the place opened itself, or was opened, though I do know what boundaries were broken. The lake lay frozen, the sky still as folded wings. And everywhere snow blown into the rooms, strewn across the braided rugs and knotty boards, under chairs, creeping like a slow cold tide, white and silent, out of its element with greed. Then I remembered the photograph, black and white, as old as me or older. What eye watched that scene, taking it in, shameless, I don't know, though I do know that boundaries were broken: A woman, her grey dress blowing toward land, lost on the shore in the dim light of her long day's end, and a man, farther up the beach, alone. The sea— mute, infinite entity—taking in its borders hungrily; and the stolen child it drank up when each entered the other in a moment of dropped vigilance. In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we love against the winds of loss. The woman, the man, their child gone—slipped from the safe home of their love, swallowed whole. I am not going to try to feel what that woman felt, or to speak with her voice. I don't know what she did next or how she did what she did next. She is the mother, my fear, all the love ever lost to grief. Her pain is an ocean vaster than planets, a diaspora of longing flung to all four flogging winds. In her life, I am sure that time drifted past her, with her, within her. I know that that summer, like all summers, moved on through the fall into winter, that the shore closed up, abandoned, cold. And that the thing lost still blows through us, the swollen door no longer shuts.

Borne forward by extended increments. Crawling waterward from this weed wilted shore. Like small furred voles skittering inward, taking little grounded, mirrored steps: Like this, intervals of ice ridge and rime the pond rim. By night. As if by dreaming ice might cast its million limbs over that surface above. Its frozen tincture outfolding farther, farther unfurling across. By dawn: The moonspread scales then a foregone conclusion. Constructed, transmutable truth: All day ice shrinking from the light, reconsidering. And still, in leaving, leaving its lingering doubt, pale shadow of wingspan edgebound. Near. Then again in dark the cold falling, fallen to glow on the meniscus, ice groping forward with more sliding white. Ice: Its own logic, growing: Its horizontal precipice. Its glass carapace. Night's cold and hoary frost. Vaster still till all its heirs' outstretched tips interslip, imprint with their ferny whorls an entire span between lands. To travel that unthinkably far! And then, having reached to cry out more room!—crack like a shell, heave between its crushing shores. But which pressing which? And what boundary divides water from ice, what self solidifies against self, which is water—host or whore? Ice now in spring dissolving, dissolute reversal by increments retreating. Not I, alive, here mudnudged under eaves, forming my young egg by egg, mother's lasting bequest. To nest once in heat. To hatch and be born.

Will death be like this? Like waking from a long dream still held—grounded— in the body disremembered? Spinning ceiling, close call? Foolish beating heart? Those trembling aftershocks of some electric message where bone met motion, clamoring in ligaments, that lingering tremolo singing in the ears like doubt, maybe the echo of some unrecognized once-familiar name. Estranged touch of wind over skin, on damp arms the hair not yet laid down . . . Breath's sour fluctuations not quite tamed. Cheeks' flush loosening, a displaced temperature sensed, unseasonal. Flash of light burning against walls, image after image, an eye, a frame, missing there. Where, searching, searchless, you can't point to or put a finger on, nevertheless an urge surging in raised fingers. A circle discontinuous, once rounded out by mouth. Throbbing inside the brow, no accessible thought. Specifically no memory arising from follicles still tingling, the dulling skull heedless, singed with salty pores. What if it's like this, only without the body?

But it is not always quiet here. Things go on while we sleep the sleep of soldiers. Ancient branches crack and splinter into dust. Large wings snap open in spring like carpets splayed out over the railing. Granite splits apart at the seams and great animals cleave roads through woods. Daily, in the density, there is life on the edge of the knife that cuts the world into hemispheres of sense and death. Trees are born and die, bones turn to humus, glaciers to meadowland. It is time to turn yourself loose, like new leaves, like big lakes on which swim enormous birds at a distance deeper in breadth than the water's depth. Their shadows pull you to the shore. Their size fills your lungs with sky. It is time to heave aside the boulders and the dams, to come back out like a bear after the thaw, to be ready for the forest, for the forage, for the full and waning moons. You will get soaked in wet grass, feel the insects pierce your skin. You will learn to balance between gravity and light. There will be hot and sticky nights, sharp songs at dawn, long and bright ineffable days. This is your chance to crash your way through underbrush unlocking like so many doors.

One against the other across the fleetingly infinite field: that dry crackling of pallid corn stalks clacking comes close to it. behind them mountains range like steppes between the tiers of fog they coddle. it's autumn coming close again and you need to compare this one to autumns past, recall the other sputters of color too good to last. something you need to say, something you come close to: wind in its limitless visits— especially in fall when it cleans the overblown trees— wind in possession of you says it best. but you go on anyway, trying to pen the breeze: this fall phenomenon different from summer's in its macabre celebration of the lifeless, in its forever rewritten memory of what comes next. sorrel leaves swirling in a whirlwind mimic your own compulsive repetition, its own circle of yearning so close to a kind of comfort. quickening conversations of geese flocking south chill through your thin skin: behind it a choir of silence undefined rows you closer to what you'll never forget, what you almost remember this time. closer to its name. the heart overtaken. the bare staves waving at boughs' ends, the musical red wings: something they almost say, more like a sense hunched in darkness, an ache, a suspicion: every time, closer to it, closer. hear hard light on the hillside flatten the visible scale into two dimensions, and you're in love with the flatted third: the way it breaks you down, over and over, to mean you are alive. the way you rub it in the wound that you never come close to wanting to close— as if you could scrub away the whirling of everything else and come down like snow to the center, the eye, so close to the purity of knowing inside this present pain, that searing white place without wind or words.

It's hard to tell that the face of the moon is as much like a man's as god's. Out yonder, in the world without us, who's to say? — Either we get in the way, or things make use of us. Half-way around the globe from where they started, the static sound of starlings echoes off the barn roof. Spider weave in the spokes of wheels, and stars circle unsuspecting suns. Little do we know, the world has a talent for making itself at home. Meanwhile, we paint our self- portraits on everything imaginable, then hold them up like mirrors. Our mercurial brushes grow longer, our skills more acute. Dust clouds the vision, tinder to the eye. So we burn trees to save the forests, burn air to fly afar. We do, we say. We can. The time is close at hand. Time was (said a man) you could tell the weather from the moon. That was before another broke   the quicksilver distance and walked all over it. Now you can't tell a thing.

It was twilight all day. Sometimes the smallest things weigh us down, small stones that we can't help admiring and palming. Look at the tiny way this lighter vein got inside. Look at the heavy gray dome of its sky. This is no immutable world. We know less than its atoms, rushing through. Light, light. Light as air, to them, for all we know. Trust me on this one, there is happiness at stake. Boulder, grain. Planet, dust: What fills the stones fills us. I remember, or I have a feeling, I could be living somewhere with you, weighted down the way we aren't now. Often the greatest things, those you'd think would be the heaviest, are the very ones that float.

It isn't true about the lambs. They are not meek. They are curious and wild, full of the passion of spring. They are lovable, they are not silent when hungry. Tonight the last of the triplet lambs is piercing the quiet with its need. Its siblings are stronger and will not let it eat. I am its keeper, the farmer, its mother, I will go down to it in the dark, in the cold barn, and hold it in my arms. but it will not lie still—it is not meek. I will stand in the open doorway under the weight of watching trees and moon, and care for it as one of my own. But it will not love me—it is not meek. Drink, little one. Take what I can give you. Tonight the whole world prowls the perimeters of your life. Your anger keeps you alive— it's your only chance. So I know what I must do after I have fed you. I will shape my mouth to the shape of the sharpest words, even those bred in silence. I will inhale with words every ear pressed upon open air. I will not be meek. You remind me of the necessity of having more hope than fear, and of sounding out terrible names. I am to cry out loud like a hungry lamb, cry loud enough to waken wolves in the night. No one can be allowed to sleep.

I will hear his sleep in and through my own, my sleep will be bathed in his as if we slept in one same fluid My sleep floats within a listening so deep that the separating spaces of air become as pliant and full as snowfall, its singing silence as profound My ears and his throat — the sensation of anticipated hearing close inside the ear and the incipient murmur or cry forming at the end of his sleep — borne like birds and thrumming on the air of rooms between us My own sleep will be his clock, safely keeping time, his sleep tunes my dreams to listen, our sleep binds the hour, heavy and warm, into a blanket of air and sound

Darkness is not a death, does not obliterate, will not bury you or take your breath away. Darkness will not erase you the way it erases day with night because darkness is not the clock but merely the time falling away from the clock's circular face. Darkness is not the loss but the thing misplaced, not the hammer but the nail in its curved emergence from wood's grasp, not the storm's insurgence but the limbs broken off from their miraculous suspension in a storm out far, beyond us. Darkness is not about hearts, imperfect as they are, but what leaks through their incorrigible doors, not the stars but the glissade or glide of their dust. Darkness no longer shields the hunters' musk in search of you, or turns you to animal prey, it is only a measure of weight or days. Not something without a beginning or an end, it is not even—especially not—an end. Nor is it vertigo, nor the whole, but merely a piece. No, darkness is but a ghost of an idea, the least remembered, most estranged prayer, and your fear but a lingering, limbic fear torn from shreds of forgotten years. Only that much is clear.