Spring Snow

Here comes the powdered milk I drank as a child, and the money it saved. Here come the papers I delivered, the spotted dog in heat that followed me home and the dogs that followed her. Here comes a load of white laundry from basketball practice, and sheets with their watermarks of semen. And here comes snow, a language in which no word is ever repeated, love is impossible, and remorse. . . . Yet childhood doesn’t end, but accumulates, each memory knit to the next, and the fields become one field. If to die is to lose all detail, then death is not so distinguished, but a profusion of detail, a last gossip, character passed wholly into fate and fate in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.