December 13
Returned, now, out of some sense of necessity, some compulsion in me to unself, to push through an external sieve & return me again to myself, to cull, to see what drops from my clutching fingers & what remains rooted in my palm. Since October, winter has swallowed me whole. If it was desolate here in the warmth of summer or the first breath of fall, now it is a kind of barrenness the mind can hardly conceive; not my own, which thinks in it, through it, by way of it. Temperatures down to forty below. Howling gales ripping through passes at hurricane force. One suspended incident of an empty fuel-oil drum & a cabin frozen to ten degrees at best, me huddled there by the woodstove, layered & buried in blanket (consequence of poor preparation, like most calamity). & the roads slick with black ice, the truck on several occasions now careening to glide, bald-tired, towards some interrupted fate. & the sun muting the horizon & painting it darker in swift succession