Landscape with Black Coats in Snow
(an unpublished poem from War of the Foxes)
A door had been opened and could not be shut and then
it was shut. I turned my back and felt thevacuum of
myleaving. I live in big spaces, so I’m left alone in big spaces.
Thinking in the language of the enemy. Moving through
the landscape of the enemy. We were spies and the confidants
of spies, pockets and telephones, gathering evidence without
leaving any. Spies feel like they know something important.
It is a feeling. Opulent. Grand. We invented a fence in the
middle of the snow so we could meet at the fence and whisper.
Clemency at the fence. These small repeated revelations
stabilize something. Faith in snow, bravery in snow. A daily
maintenance. Is this your sadness? asks the trashman. No, that
is a fishbone and that is a soup can and that over there is no
longer recognizable. Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness
of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves
snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by
each others’ knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender,
it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow.
I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story.
We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.
