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Excerpt

    Snow

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth

I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.

For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels

had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.

He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.

Then we were on the roof of the lake.

The ice looked like a photograph of water.

Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.

I didn't know where I was going with this.

They were on his property, I said.

When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.

Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.

Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.

A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.

But why were they on his property, he asked.

    Classic Water

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for

the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out

        and I heard her whisper

"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag

        with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop

when we picked up an unknown man sobbing

over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves

that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote

on what we should do next and the time she said

"all water is classic water" and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers

like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating

a private judicial system within U.S. borders.

Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night

by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake,

talking about the paradox of multiple Santas

or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends

as what's-his-face, which was wrong of me and I'd like

to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what's-his-rice.

    Civics

She had been the court stenographer

in the little village for two decades

when she disappeared into the mountains.

I was part of the search party that day.

Snow was pending and the bare branches

looked like mounted antlers on the canyon walls.

I walked with Glenn from White Moon Insurance

for hours through columns of shimmering firs

and over ponds frozen into opal tables

until, arriving at an overlook at dusk,

we heard the cracking of a hammer

echoing through the burnished valley

and saw what looked like the old judge

and twelve other men and women

pitching camp for the night.

    Governors on Sominex

It had been four days of no weather

as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.

They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings

and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.

The evening edition carried the magic death of a child

backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.

I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.

Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.

* * *

The moon hung solid over the boarded-up Hobby Shop.

P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call

to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light

by which he traveled into this and that.

And out in the city, out in the wide readership,

his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket

in the woods behind the Marriott,

his younger brother who was missing that part of the brain

that allows you to make out with your pillow.

Poor kid.

It was the light in things that made them last.

* * *

Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station

to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved.

The tall grass bent in the wind like tachometer needles

and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating

the number of the Job Info Line.

She hung up and glared at the Killbuck Sweet Shoppe.

The words that had been running through her head,

"employees must wash hands before returning to work,"

kept repeating and the sky looked dead.

* * *

Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind.

A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship

reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held.

He'd had mouthwash at the inn and could still feel

the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth.

There were no new ways to understand the world,

only new days to set our understandings against.

Through the lanes came virgins in tennis shoes,

their hair shining like videotape,

singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn't tried yet.

Each page was a new chance to understand the last.

And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.

    The Spine of the Snowman

    On the moon, an old caretaker in faded clothes is holed up in his

pressurized cabin. The fireplace is crackling, casting sparks onto the

instrument panel. His eyes are flickering over the earth,

looking for Illinois,

looking for his hometown, Gnarled Heritage,

    until his sight is caught in its chimneys and frosted aerials.

    He thinks back on the jeweler's son who skated the pond

behind his house, and the local supermarket with aisles

that curved off like country roads.

Yesterday the robot had been asking him about snowmen.

He asked if they had minds.

No, the caretaker said, but he'd seen one

that had a raccoon burrowed up inside the head.

"Most had a carrot nose, some coal, buttons, and twigs for arms,

but others were more complex.

Once they started to melt, things would rise up

from inside the body. Maybe a gourd, which was an organ,

or a long knobbed stick, which was the spine of the snowman."

The robot shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

Copyright © 1999 David Berman. All rights reserved.