03.26.01 - 11:59 p.m.

it's a cold night, and the air has the sharp, clear texture of glass. football weather - last game of the season stuff, the kind where you drag out the little chemical hand heater bags mom bought last year and are grateful for earmuffs. cold that makes you slap together your well-gloved hands before picking up a steaming, brimming styrofoam mug of hot chocolate and curl over the licks of steam rising from the circle of liquid - and watch your breath play havoc on the tranquility of the surface the tension.

it feels like the first freeze of autumn - where the air is sharp and singed with woodsmoke and despite your bright numb face, breathing is a cold, painful, lovely thing.

fire weather. blanket weather. huge hot mugs of tea weather and vegetable soup. cocooning weather - the roof is a pleasure, the walls a gift and you could fold into yourself, into the texture of your skin and the warm weight of an old quilt and dream bright winter dreams.

you start worrying about the pansies you planted in hopes of color through the long dreariness of gray skies and brown earth, but secretly you hope for the transfixing white world that swims like beneath the surface of the shortening evenings and draws you back to the weather report like a dog to the sound of the can opener, opening.

it's snowing in the mountains.

jazz and firelight, protecting from the sharp, brilliant shock of the glittering sky.

i'm gonna love you like nobody's loved you, come rain or come shine

tinkly piano weather.

and even though i lit a candle for the cherry tree, that the unseasonable cold snap does not kill its buds and deprive me of its extravaganza, i'm grateful for the reminder of the pleasures of winter, and the contemplation of the warm texture of just skin.

i have half-a-hundred half poems tapped into a notebook, scribbled on napkin scraps and post-it notes as if i were piecing together a life, from the minutiae of its passing - as if i were collecting grocery lists and enigmatic messages to learn the pathways of another, or myself.

i don't collect the words so much as the moment. the brief, sunlit fascination of pen upon paper and strange, tranfixing magic of otherself. awareness that seeps up around your ragged, light-bleeding edges the way color creeps upon on a calla lily's green.

and i don't mind bleeding light. it's the only way to remember fire.