The house down the street has a glass outer door etched with a geometric pattern that magnifies the sun shining through; the red paint on the inner door is blistered in the shape of the pattern, peeled away to show the gray wood beneath like the pale, thickened tissue of burn scars still streaked with pink. I don’t suppose the people who own the ruined door think it’s nearly as cool as I do.
The snowplows have written our neighborhood off and it feels like only a matter of minutes until a herd of caribou wander by; I’ve always wanted to move to the Arctic but this morning it’s moved to me instead.
One of the peregrine falcons that soar over Boston Common was down in the subway this evening, hunting mice on the tracks; held only a few feet overhead by the ceiling of the tunnel, it looked both very big and terribly small.
On the train, the woman to my left reads a book translated from paper to Kindle. On my right, another woman reads printouts of Powerpoint slides.
The furnace’s boiler cracked while I was out of town and the house is so cold that putting my hands in the refrigerator warms them up, which is helpful since I have to warm the TV remote in my hands before it will work.
Snowgrains swirling in every direction, the Etch-A-Sketch face of the world is refreshed.
First rabbit to turn up in our tiny yard huddles against the foundation all day and then dies; an unpleasant pattern emerges and reminds me (why?) of Larkin’s “Going”:
There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.
Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.
Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?
What loads my hands down?
One guy in a suit on the sidewalk told the other guy in a suit on the sidewalk, “He should be banished from the bathroom for, like, two weeks.” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.
The only goldfinch to show up in our yard this year is the one that died on the front steps overnight.
Two tweets I would Twitter (were I a twitterer):
- I walked behind a time traveling executive, come from the 1970s for a meeting. His hair was Brady Bunch permed, his mustache was vintage, and so were his suit, case, and shoes. None of it worn out or old — they must have been purchased just before he journeyed into the future.
- All the rosehips fallen from the bush near my hose have dried out, stems and leaves curling up and away from the fruit, like tiny pink octopi dead all over the sidewalk.