November 21

How quickly accustomed we grow to our surroundings, in spite of their essential surreality. The windowed walls of this barn & the views they open upon already a kind of ingrained familiarity. After our trip we didn’t hesitate to unpack, to scour the place, to make a home of it. With winter coming on I wonder at it. The water will need to be shut off in anticipation of enduring cold so the exposed pipes leading to and from the outdoor shower don’t freeze & burst. The wood stove, bless its heart, cannot fill this space with heat, though it blazes tigerbright under its sooted lip & though I’ve come to find comfort in its spit & crackle. Perhaps it is having moved so many times already in my life, or perhaps I am still gradually unburdening myself of the exhaustion that attends to a slow & indeliberate move across the country. In either case thinking beyond this barn is almost an impossibility, if a necessity. & snow will come, soon, & send its flakes dissolving in the cresting white waves. The looming old growth firs will be appareled in celestial hue, the fields quiet & mute. & our breath, substance & nothing at all, will usher from our pink lungs into a tender air. Suddenly these thin walls seem to suffice, paper-crisp in stucco. I don’t know a great deal about how places come to mean beyond themselves, how homes are built of houses, how certain physical locations, certain place-names alone, even, can come to sing in us like some grand untutored memory; but I feel that this place, this barn around me, has come to metaphorize something so much greater than itself. Its song is one distant & familiar at once, already sepia-toned, already imbued with a timelessness. Some things we encounter as if they were already passed, recognizing in them an efficacy that we know will endure beyond circumstance & flux, storm & stress. Such things, whatever their nature, seem to me the very fundament of how lives come to meaning (& maybe it is the ascension to meaning that life demands rather than the inverse; to ply one’s days into cohesion, into rich foment, rather than to dully await some knock upon the door). That awful sadness that I find in My Antonia, the slow & mournful dirge of the plains, the wellspring of enervated air along certain foot-paths, that call-note that sounds like a prayer sent out from solitary confrontations with oneself, an embrace, a glance recalled in which the eyes thunder still, the ineffable marvel that, as Oppen put it, we cannot speak of because we are in it, always. There is such rapture in it, even as I gripe about splinters caught in my skin from carrying wood inside or mutter about the insidious cold. We are in constant communion with the unspeakable. Here, somehow, my ear tunes in to the rhapsody, if even my mouth cannot follow in syllable.