the valley in the poem was supposed to be wintering but it had taken me far too long to start, and that spring green once seen could not be ignored. so - nail scissors from amazon, bulk order, landed, and then I gathered the local children - just from this village and the five or six nearest-by - and sent them up the trees. they don't climb so fast these days. oh, the past. but the trees by tuesday morning were properly stark, and the dawn when angling through them looked genuinely chilly. 

there's a statue of a naked man, sleepwalking, in the snow. he wants something, he's come all this way, his fingers are blue, reaching forward into something he can't see. maybe he wants to speak to you, but he can't see you, he is asleep. he can't hear you and doesn't want to, nobody sleepwalks towards a voice unless it's their own, pulled in frozen globules from the gut, from the seat of the unbreachable dream to the air and falling, twitching, little morsels inside out. has he come here to give you this or did someone place him here? is he walking away from his own burning feet? or that was a long time ago, and you have to get to class now. have to narrow to a whisper in the whispering crowd. 

not only remembering where it was buried, but that it came up perfectly clean. then won me a turtle, then won me an onionskin.