“Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does.”
- “There really are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow,’” The Washington Post
1.
This much I know—
each morning my brother unwraps himself
from sheets and sleep and moves to his piano
like a ghost. His long fingers ache out
a winter song—for the still-blue morning
and early February and the days I wake
to yesterday’s snow and his notes falling through
cold air like so many prayers.
2.
Wintertime in upstate New York—my brother and I
in our great-aunt’s horse barn. We are nine and ten
and he is not yet taller than me, still swimming in my hand-me-down
coat. We’ve snuck away from family dinner and ducked
the wooden planks at the stable door—now alone with the horses,
their gentle huffing, shifting hooves in snow.
My brother approaches one—dark maned, white spray
of chest—holds out his small hand in offering. Brief pause,
momentary brush between palm and whiskered nose.
A holiness in the silence, shrinking space between boy and animal.
I’m holding my breath. I want to get closer but suddenly the door I left open
swings shut and the horse spooks, rears back on hind legs.
From this close, I can see round flank and thick knots of muscle,
flakes of hay flying. When I reach for my brother my hands grasp
at nothing and I am so sure that he has somehow turned to snow—
swirling snow, remembered snow, snow mixing itself with breath.
But it is just his coat that I’ve caught between fingers, so I reach again
until I find shoulder, hard curve of bone. When I pull him close to me,
he is not afraid but glassy-eyed, awe-drunk at this being,
the thunder of it. Mouth slack and emptied.
All his words flown out into whitened world.
3.
Tomorrow’s snow, snow that makes haloes,
snow sparkling with moonlight, starlight, flashlight.
Snow at dawn. Snow that makes pictures in the air,
that blinds you, that never reaches the ground.
4.
March, spring cleaning, many years later. Snow still piled along roadside,
now muddied, puddled. I am the only one home, surrounded by things,
various proofs of my presence. I peek into my brother’s room, sun-flooded
and all taken-apart, packed into neat piles: collared shirts, too-small blazer,
thumbed-through copy of Sartre. Sometimes I wish I could walk through him
like a room, memorize its quiet interior. Then, I think, I wouldn’t imagine
the horse again and again, the way the snow seemed to pause, floating—
the trembling space its body left in the air.
There is something I’m supposed to learn from this, I know—
some kind of prayer. I move from room to room,
begin the careful work of remembering.
5.
Later, I’ll wake to early-spring snow making haloes of the streetlights outside.
My dreams already forgotten except for one scene: my brother, running into a frost-covered pasture
waving for me to follow. My chest swollen with air, hands splayed in the dimness.
They reach, palms open, for something unsayable and sought after.