Snowflakes, and: The Fog, and: The Forest

Abstract

Snowflakes, and: The Fog, and: The Forest Jennifer Grotz (bio) Yesterday they were denticulate as dandelion greens, they locked together in spokes and fell so weightlessly I thought of best friends holding hands. And then of mating hawks that soar into the air to link their claws and somersault down, separating just before they touch the ground. Sometimes the snowflakes glitter, it’s more like tinkling than snow, it never strikes, and I want to be struck, that is I want to know what to do. I begin enthusiastically, I go in a hurry, I fall pell-mell down a hill, like a ball of yarn’s unraveling trajectory—down and away but also surprising ricochets that only after seem foretold. Yesterday I took a walk because I wanted to be struck, and what happened was an accident: a downy clump floated precisely in my eye. The lashes clutched it close, melting it against the eye’s hot surface. And like the woman talking to herself in an empty church who eventually realizes she is praying, I walked home with eyes that melted snow. [End Page 18] The Fog Outside a gorgeous morning fog I stare at while inside coffee spreads its alerting warmth and my mind starts to soar, that sensation I have loved ever since, as a child, I learned to read without moving my lips. Just in my mind! How startling it was, like a radio or a river only I could hear. Never back then did I wonder how to turn it off. Now it’s how I can talk directly to you: oh fog, how I used to watch you roll in on those spring mornings in Cassis, how you could make the entire mountain outside my window disappear and the whole world so visibly into a chamber of such beautiful doubt that it would appall when something so substantial as a bird would swoop out and land on the terrace. Clarity, I suppose, only comes when you leave but I love what soft featureless comfort you are. And when you speak back, like the steam I have watched in moments of perfectly useless concentration emerge from the electric kettle on its way to climax, a swirling atomic dust, particles wobbling up out of the spout and then a thickening, grainy as ash, and the force increasing and rising high like the flame from an untrimmed wick and then the curling plumes of voluptuous tresses of steam, thirty seconds of such sensual escape!— A domestic iteration of what Jupiter said to Io, I think, in the Correggio where he comes to her as a cloud and the soles of her feet glow rosy as skin flushed after a hot bath. I think I could stand a long time and watch the fog calling its visual whisper, while I eat an orange, its rind suede-soft under my fingernails, the smell it fills the room with the opposite of fog. [End Page 19] Just come closer, approach an eros you cannot enter, try to find where I begin in the faint outlines of trees that from where you stand now look like a smudge, look like something once there but now erased, that is to say, look like the past. [End Page 20] The Forest During the day I have watched them stand around and chew the yellow grass, the long-suffering cows. Sometimes steam comes from their nostrils. I have also visited them at night, seen an entire herd standing in the rain, as unreacting as the trees behind them when the jitter of flashlight warned of my approach. Those were the cows in the field by the forest, and those were the days when going outside felt like going inside. There was the sound of a woodpecker pecking, and that was a kind of knocking. And the sound of the pine trees creaking, and that was a kind of door. And so you could enter the forest, and although each moment you trespassed further became more tense, it only lasted until you could no longer see the road. Then you would be inside, on a kind of unending staircase of roots worn silver like...