Thomas Reiter

Softly pummeled overnight, the lower limbs of our Norway spruce flexed and the deepening snow held them. Windless sunlight now, so I go out wearing hip waders and carrying not a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin worrying the snow for the holdfast of a branch that’s so far down a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy. I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling, then pull straight up. A current of air as the needles loft their burden over my head. Those grace notes of the snowfall, crystals giving off copper, green, rose—watching them I stumble over a branch, go down and my gloves fill with snow. Ah, I find my father here: I remember as a child how flames touched my hand the time I added wood to the stove in our ice-fishing shanty, how he plunged that hand through the hole into the river, teaching me one kind of burning can ease another. The branch bobs then tapers into place and composes itself, looking unchanged though all summer it will bring up this day from underfoot.

We wear harnesses like crossing guards. In a pouch over the heart, over stent and bypass, a black box with leads pressed onto metal nipples. We pedal and tread and row while our signals are picked up by antennas on the ceiling, X’s like the eyes cartoonists give the dead. Angels of telemetry with vials of nitro watch over us. We beam to their monitors now a barn dance, now a moonwalk. They cuff us and pump and we keep on so tomorrow will live off today. Nurse, we won’t forget the animated video of our cholesterol highway where LDL, black-hatted scowling donut holes on wheels, blocked traffic. But with muscles like gutta-percha, can we leave time’s gurney in the dust? By now only the dead know more about gravity than we do. In reply, a tape of Little Richard or Jerry Lee comes on and we’re singing, aloud or not, all pale infarcted pedalers, rowers, treadmillers, and our hearts are rising in the east.