apparently the set viewing with the breastfeeding yeti has made some students uncomfortable. it is not a good story. because that is not how stories go. the trouble began with the wool puppets. because they're naked. does it help if we think of it as a garden of eden narrative? no, that doesn't help. and if we think of the goat as pan? once we know who pan is? that does not help.  might the final scene with the yeti be a version of heaven? no, heaven is not like that. this is fiction. 

What does a farmer wear? what is that thick felted zip-collared broad shouldered hay black needle-shin handshake in Christmas Eve day aisle - Jack! plum pudding, Happy Christmas to you

there was that bird and now it's gone there was that flurry and now it's gone there was that silence and now it's gone 

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. 

five degrees

1

ahh mummummum ahh. teeterer, crookt wings arch tail. ahhh ahhh. teeterer. ground fingers mouth. gummy ridge. clay. to clean hole, a mummum. brung a seed. brung a none. brung a mummummum. crown stroke. straight up son. arch plant fold. mmmm. mm between. mmm a none. mmm a mummum. a crack. click a gap. thick as. a trick, filament track. in a none. in a none none. ahh ahh. a stretch. cold in a rock crop a cot. a got. a got got. a dapper nap. crow crossd. grabbit, a hole. cleant a trick. sole archd n swung. its here or it's not. a tot tot. up a tot. it's here or it's not.

2

we'll be made of wool. you'll be seven foot tall. you'll be forty and so strong. I'll be eighty and yield. breast of wool warm in the cliff wind. wind of wool. chalky yield. scribbles blue, petering. you'll be you. be eighty and climb. be twelve. feet on the cliff. blue. shooting up over a sea of yield. with crumby hummus feet & finger nubs of wool & woollen sun. it'll be warm. with back pocket pills of fuzz & woollen sun.