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WAITING FOR SNOW ON THE VERY EDGE OF WINTER
Waiting for snow on the very edge of winter, the silence of trees with their birds flown south, they are all gone, the bears have gone into hibernation, why am i still here? squirrels race up the tired grey pencil line branches that will soon hold the tough clumps of needles that will snow up to the sky, i follow the squirrel along the ground, enjoying the spring of its tiny back legs, the way it always stops to looks around, the first thing it does is look for the bigger things that could eat it, i have just fed from my own joy, aided by the squirrel, i follow it further or is it leading me?, then it reaches another squirrel's territory, for fifteen minutes they chirp and quarrel, are chasing the other, the sprite whiskered temperament and bashing-ups, up and down the spruce and pine, the mother elk is sitting on the pathway at the banff school for the arts, the pathway is between herself and her fawn who is in a bush, artists and academics use the pathway leading from one building to another, each time a student passes between her and her young, she stops chewing and waits, to charge or not to charge?, there have been reports downtown about a young male elk who never got enough, he is charging at people, we are told it's best to hide behind a tree, rather than to try and grab the horns of an elk, even a blizzard straight from the arctic will slip straight through them, the wind had no chance of holding that elk to ransom, so what chance have we with our feeble hands, our rosy frozen faces, gloves, mittens, at minus twenty you can be outside for two minutes before your skin starts to freeze and what does it feel like? it feels like the time you swallowed ice cream too hard and too fast as a child, it feels like this across your eyebrows and along your front teeth, you will soon go scurrying back inside to the central heating of the rooms, and huge heated tunnels from home to the shopping malls, i want the snow to love me but i caught a raging cold, i caught the cold inside my head and inside my chest, i threw it off with a herbal drink called echinacea, i want to throw off the damage of cold like throwing off a parker at an australian airport, i want the cold to love me but it's too dangerous to have inside yourself, and i had to let it go, the squirrel i follow goes about its tiny business at the beginning of winter, it races along the branch before the sun, i saw the silhouette of a squirrel along a golden background, a tinge of sun hanging silently on a cold white branch, a white snowy ridge clustered with christmas trees, can you imagine being an australian?, i have never seen a squirrel in the wild, and would prefer never to have seen one at all, if i couldn't have seen it exactly in this moment, exactly like it was today, october 24th 1996, most precious day of all time, canada alberta with its big silent winter filling up the valleys, it was a very light dry snow, it was very pretty, i notice that there is no wind, i suddenly realise that australia is very windy, and the colourful parrots in the wind have a raw cheekiness about them, although i have never heard or seen them, i miss the all the birds who have gone south for the winter, it is unnerving waiting for snow without the sound of birds, waiting for the sound of snow, the smell of snow comes first, without the sense of many animals, on the very edge of an arctic winter, the horizontal branches holding the pine needles are expectant of snow, they are equip to carry the thick bright ice on their strong knotty hinges, to hold it high into the sun and the freeze, to canadian poets this landscape is a backdrop to their work, to be in it is stunned ice, my mouth falls loosely open so my teeth sting, everything i look out upon is scrutinised, overwhelmed and comes back to be the colour white, i drink tahitian tea, made from vanilla beans with soy milk and sugar, a warm sweet drink in the thick snowy place, paper white, unwritten upon, three blue heelers sit on the gravel in banff, on the black road of dirty ice carrying australia in their genes, they seemed to be aliens here, like those australian parrots in tiny cages in the pet shops of narita japan, how i hated to see that, but it's the same as the prisons across australia, the desert section of zoo bird life quarterised by wire, gaps not big enough to stick its head through, in order to speak desert language, in order to shriek and strangle itself, i said, 'my ears are raw and my eyeballs burn hurt from too much seeing,' she said, 'it's when they're not burning that you've got to worry, that is the death of the skin,' i said, 'i'm learning, it's even not cold yet and it's pretty fucking cold.' |
