A World to Do

“I busy too,” the little boy said, lost in his book about a little boy, lost in his book, with nothing but a purple crayon and his wits to get him out. “Nobody can sit with me, I have no room. I busy too. So don’t do any noise. We don’t want any noise right now.” He leafs through once, leafs twice; the pictures, mixed with windy sighs, grow dizzy, world as difficult, high-drifting as the two-day snow that can not stop. How will the bushes, sinking deeper and deeper, trees and birds, wrapt up, ever creep out again? Any minute now the blizzard, scared and wild, the animals lost in it—O the fur, the red-eyed claws, crying for their home—may burst into the room. Try words he’s almost learned on them? He sighs, “I need a man here; I can’t do all this work alone.” And still, as though intent on reading its own argument, winter continues thumbing through itself.