Winter Fugue

Went for a run again today, cloaked in guitar cloth, the silk of music, blood running warmly to the skin as I get going, making of my body a furnace, a fire in my being, my being a fire, and I say guitar not for precision, nor for imprecision, but because I like the word, and the snow under my feet went crunch crunch crackle, or no sound at all, most of it silent, white, brilliantly white save in patches of beige, don’t know what causes that, something to do with the way it gets mushed by cars. R followed carrying a bag of peanuts. A few crows made themselves apparent, either by swooping down and landing in front of us, or cawing loudly from a phone line or tree branch. The cars are the biggest annoyance. One wonders what’s so important someone anyone has to get in their car and risk their life and everyone else’s life by driving in the snow, though perhaps I’m not being entirely fair, could be they’ve got four-wheel drive, and can handle it securely, the treachery of snow like the treachery of Loki, the Norse god of mischief. You can see where this is headed, the stuff going on in one’s head when one is outdoors doing outdoor things and the inner life drags behind, races to catch up, impose itself in the merry disorder of thoughts, ideas lissome and noisy as seagulls. Hungry, too. Hungry for combination, interrelation, the philosophy of contusion, blood rushing to the skin in the bruising air of winter, that giant season of sparkling lights and stinging cold. Constellations and corollaries galore move like school of herring among the molecules of texture, the text of texture in the ripples and crests and crusts and footprints in the snow. The cosmos has fallen to earth, has come to lie on the ground, sprawl there under one’s feet, slippery and wild, fugitive to fugitive in a race to the end, the final dissipation, the great thaw, the leaning back into the gaping maw of oblivion, and falling into the rise of it, the rising fall, the place where hoods do more for the head than steel.