In the cellar I fold and sort and watch through a squint in the dirty window the plain bright snow. Unlike the earth, snow is neuter. Unlike the moon, it stays. It falls, not from grace, but a silence which nourishes crystals. My son catches them on his tongue. Whatever I try to hold perishes. My son and I lie down in white pastures of snow and flap like the last survivors of a species that couldn’t adapt to the air. Jumping free, we look back at angels, blurred fossils of majesty and justice from the time when a ladder of angels joined the house of the snow to the houses of those whom it covered with a dangerous blanket or a healing sleep. As I lift my body from the angel’s, I remember the mad preacher of Indiana who chose for the site of his kingdom the footprint of an angel and named the place New Harmony. Nothing of it survives. The angels do not look back to see how their passing changes the earth, the way I do, watching the snow, and the waffles our boots print on its unleavened face, and the nervous alphabet of the pheasant’s feet, and the five-petaled footprint of the cat, and the shape of snowshoes, white and expensive as tennis, and the deep ribbons tied and untied by sleds.
