Continuing Exercise

(Continuing)

"I am a voice on wheels." Dylan Thomas

I waited for the coldest night and then decided to put a tepee in the front yard, to build a fire inside, to sit around the circle sharing with my friends and getting lost in song together with no sense of the dangerous winds blowing all around us, winds that could freeze you solid in minutes, wind without concern for anyone or anything because it was wind.

What carries the flurries through the dark skies surrounding such a place also carries you. True isn't it? What is more alive than wind?

We sing about it together in the tepee and we dream of the coming day out on the ice where we will carve out holes in the deep frozen surface and give ourselves time to tease out perch and bluegill whose thoughts are unknown to fishermen, whose air is water, whose wind filters through the gills, who fly on currents flowing deep beneath the surface.

A sweet breakfast of sausage and pancakes and coffee, clunking plates and forks and glasses, with their tinkling of ice; three juices, that of cranberry and carrot and mango, small packets of raw sugar, the napkins; all waited at the breakfast table at home. It was a table like that of a restaurants with even the wood carved puzzle game where one took golf tees and hopped one over the other in the hopes of finishing off the golf tees. The aroma of frying sausages filled the air with laughter about how no one living there is a waitress, no comments about the menu are made other than to hold them (all the possibilities of breakfast) as dearly to your mind, as close to your hearts imagination as possible – poached eggs on toast, corned beef hash, waffles, oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon – all while you gazed down into the frozen hole in the ice waiting for what could be your supper or tomorrow's or next days, living beings fished out to give you life, to fill your freezer.

Now you stop to ponder the relationship between appetite and language.

It had been three hours since he woke. The chair squeaked on the ice beneath him. Scrambled eggs were in his mind, he could taste the salt, the whole milk butter he'd spread on the toast. He heard the crunch of his own teeth sunk down into the brown toast, his boot crushed and shifted into the snow.

That is exactly when the jolt at the end of the pole nearly threw him off his chair.

Sometimes life gets in the way of our meandering reveries. Pull up good man! Pull up now – strong and hard! Otherwise there goes your fish. That fish. That one right there you have just thrown onto the snow who's ready for you to count its stripes. Perch. This one has four on either side.

You let out a holler without much echo returning as the snow insulates the entire landscape around you. It's white on white and filling the skies you have hardly become aware of and your first fish of the morning is already frozen beside you on the surface.

"Well that bodes well…"

You holler back to your neighbor, "could be a good morning…"

The tepee seems a thousand miles away and 100 years ago.

Soon you again are merely a voice simply speaking in a dark room waiting for the fire to take and warm the space. Outside the sky turns deep blue within minutes. The day was done and over like a good long thought.

You had thought to take in the sunset. The sparks took just then and the wood crackled and the smell of pine wood smoke wafted through the house.

So he stayed and simply kept writing down nearly everything that passed through your vision. It shifts, the one who speaks, it's always shifting, and there are many visions to be spoken out into the ether before the fire dies down again. I will find a word and share it in a book and with you in the immediate.

Now, where was I?