learns to want peace.
The trees near the fragile white house are endlessly high.
They disappear into some low-hanging cloud, all white and
puffy, wispy, watery, dripping ice that melts and burns in the
bright sun before it gets down to the ground. They are great
carcasses rooted in the solid ground, great thick things all
knotted and gnarled, or smooth and silver-streaked. They never
were just leaves: the bright colors deceived the stupid mind.
They were always their trunks, with great canals going through
them and animals living inside. They have other things growing
on them, even in the dead of winter, even partly buried under
the snow or whiplashed by it as the snow swipes on by carried
by the wind in a storm. The great trunks deceive us into seeing
them all white in a snowstorm: but they always stay themselves, the misery-racked survivors of every assault and intrusion, every wind and falling thing, every particle blown by or falling down, every stone or rock hurled against them or
brushing by: the trunk is immoveable while everything else,
except the ground underneath, moves or dies. This is a permanence beyond our own, redeemed by having no memory and no human speech.
Emmy had come from a place entirely unlike this and so
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had I. She said almost nothing about hers, except that there
was a huge city, cosmopolitan, exciting, and a university, big,
important, and all around the lush, infested green of hot jungle
thick with insects and heat. It had many languages, tribal and
colonial. It was troubling somehow: because there might not
be room for her there. Mine was simpler, city, a suburb later
on briefly: telephone poles, asphalt, seasons, the ubiquitous
cement, the endless chatter of automobiles and human talk:
not the grandeur of mountains. She hadn’t seen snow, except
maybe once before she came here. For me snow had been:
trying to get back and forth from school with the boys surrounding the girls, chasing us, heading us off, pelting us with snowballs, and the snow melting under the dirty car smoke
and turning brown and greasy, and a shovel to dig out the cars
and clear the sidewalks, and playing in the snow dressed in
snowsuits and trying to make a snowman: but especially,
trying to get back and forth from school without getting hurt
by a snowball. My snow had nothing to do with solitude or
beauty and it fell on a flat place, not a hill or mountain, with
the cement under it less solid than this New England earth,
less trustworthy, ready to break and split, ready to loosen and
turn into jagged pieces of stone big enough to throw instead of
snowballs or inside them. We were endlessly strange together,
not rich, foreign to this cool, elegant, simple, beautiful winter.
I didn’t touch her, but I touched him. Her best friend since
childhood, both in Kenya, little kids together and now here,
preparing, preparing for some adult future back home. She
took me with her and delivered me to him and I took him
instead of her, because he was as close as I could get. She was
delighted he liked me, and sullen. It happened in a beautiful
