Deciphering the Alphabet

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.