first snow

it's really starting to come down now, unexpectedly, and even from the basement of the library i can see the skinny black trees slowly shadowed in snow.


That Silent Evening
Galway Kinnell

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in low, silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back
at our tracks twining out of the woods,
where the branches we brushed against let fall
puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence,
like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch
among the trees, which is the sound that dies
inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge
hits it off center telling everything inside
it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up
but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome,
and yet als0--how could we know this?--happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow,
not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing
not to meet until heaven, but here and there
making slubby kissing stops in the field,
our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
Everything that happens here is really little more,
if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,
are almost ready, already, to bandage the one
whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when
we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches
from this moment to that. Then I will go back
to that silent evening, when the past just managed
to overlap the future, if only by a trace,
and the light doubles and shines
through the dark the sparkling that heavens the earth.

rabbit rabbit

so most of the time, i am able to understand that any sense of persecution i have is, well, entirely made up. it's a safe bet that nobody's actually judging me as i walk through campus or purposefully jostling me in the line at the airport, even though i may feel like that's the case, a lot. it's just paranoia, and i can sort of accept that.
recently, though, i'm thinking there must be more to it; the universe must be against me. of course the kids who live in my building suck, as a general rule, but why do they have to be sucky right outside my door, leaving half-eaten donuts and cheetos for me to step over in the morning? that's really not the worst of it though. i have had three items stolen from me in the last month. the first was a beautiful and hefty black umbrella, stolen on the rainiest Saturday we'd had all year, from the Valentine cloakroom--what is usually thought of as a perfectly reasonable and safe place to leave your belongings. is it possible that someone mistook it for their own? i mean...i guess, if mine hadn't been patently superior to every other umbrella in the room. and at any rate they should have returned it. then, right before Thanksgiving break, my other umbrella was stolen, from right outside my bedroom door, as it dried overnight in the hallway next to my wet shoes. (they left the shoes, so i guess i should be grateful..?) that could not have been anything but a deliberate and rather malicious act, and although i was struck at first by the absurdity of it, now i'm just mad, and hurt. finally, there are my earrings, which i guess were more lost than they were stolen. but they weren't lost; they were left, in the locked study room in the art building, and i remembered that i had left them, but, mistakenly trusting the world, decided they would be safe to stay there till morning. they were gone in the morning. they were not to be found in the Fine Arts office, nor in the Campus Police lost&found box. this loss makes me really sad--they were interesting, useful earrings, and they were a gift.
so, the world, or somebody, is out to get me--and it's kind of working.


thunder and lightening tonight, in a refreshingly cool and gusty way. my window is banging against itself. the bottoms of my jeans are damp, and my hair is getting soft and frizzy (no umbrella, you see). i have spent this week watching episodes of Seinfeld and sleeping in--what i would assume to be clear signs of depression, except that it's felt so good to do those things, minus the two times i took naps in the upstairs foyer of the Campus Center which were just pathetic (i mean, it's not even a room). it's that deceptive time of quiet before i really begin to understand how much work needs to happen and by when; right now i don't even know what any of my finals deadlines are. i started re-reading some more Eliot tonight, which was a good decision; i can already see where i'm going to go with this, the question being, how did Eliot begin to construct the notion of a modern everyday life? and of course she's also always good for the occasional Victorian nugget, like this one: "Bess belonged unquestionably to that unsoaped, lazy class of feminine characters with whom you may venture to eat 'an egg, an apple, or a nut.'* All of this she was generally conscious of, and hitherto had not been greatly ashamed of it" (Eliot, Adam Bede). i think i might start studying at the bar in Amherst Coffee more regularly--it offers many more eavesdropping opportunities. tonight i sat next to a first date that met online ("You're the first person I actually gave my number to; everyone else has been so creepy." "Oh I've found that most people have been really polite. This one girl did send me her number in the first email and ask if I'd posed for GQ, which was kind of forward." "Aw," she said lamely.) they were just uninteresting enough that i could maintain decent concentration on my novel. i also have my first real scholarly reason for using the Special Collections (my weekly trips down there freshman year to find pictures for the newspaper column do not count). they have a 1733 collection of The Spectator, which is some twenty years after it was first published, but i'm hoping these volumes will still have some advertisements and illustrations that will help in my paper for Brit lit. i won't know, though, until next week, because they have to extricate the volumes from the mold-ridden room downstairs. it's a sorry state of affairs these days in Frost. the librarian who was helping me today couldn't use the computer or spell.

*English proverb: "An apple, an egg, and a nut, you may eat though dressed by a slut"


and finally, here is a picture from Thanksgiving night, the cousins posing in front of the stairs, a little tipsy, while approximately eighteen cameras clicked and twenty adults looked on: