[Traveler, your footprints]
By Antonia Machado
Translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
Orange lights from the town plow sweep through my house, followed by the truck’s backup beeping. While I’ve been reading, the rain has fattened to snow. I stand in my kitchen, listening to the truck, wind jangling chimes hung on my back porch. All last winter, enduring through broken-sleep cancer, the plow’s whirling lights and safety backup were constants, a reminder that I was not the only one awake in town.
Again, winter.
I switch on the porch light and stand outside. Snow falls in infinite ways. This is not lacy and lazy flakes but dense wet bits. Quickly, quickly, the snow streams down. A new set of chimes this winter — not a replacement but a fresh voice for counterpoint — would be wise. This place no longer smells of broken leaf, damp earth, fragile fallen leaves turning to rot. Unstoppable, the falling snow shimmers in the lamplight, background of childhood delight.
Auto Mirror
In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
great things dwell in small ones
for a moment.
Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass
As a grad student, I lived for a few years in Bellingham, Washington, where the sunny summers (I kid you not) were a steady 75 degrees. The winters were New England dark, but lacked the drama of the deep cold, how (save for the conifers), the green gives way to sooty gray, flat white.
November, and I remind myself that I love Vermont in myriad ways, and one of those is how the seasons’ shift reflects our changing lives, too. In my walks along the river, it’s just me and two deer, a flock of starlings. The wildflowers have withered to dry stalks.
I have a bone scan at the local hospital (no major deal, a routine baseline). Afterwards, I walk around this building in the mid-afternoon light that’s already darkening towards dusk. Cold drizzle. Exactly a year ago, I was a patient here, and I find the window of the room where I stayed. That first morning, a social worker and nurse came into my room. The social worker gently suggested I write a will, stat. The nurse empathized with my diagnosis. Was I dismissive? She said, I have stage 4 cancer, and here I am, working again. It was not a comeuppance, but a widening.
A friend stops by with dinner. I slice apples and bake crisp. November, season of hearth.
The sick are ourselves, was a thing his father [also a country doctor] had said. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river. It was advice he had only sometimes forgotten. ~ Niall Williams, Time of the Child
Stony Soil Vermont 