Need no overcoat.

This great bush in my back yard houses more than a dozen sparrows, and some cardinals, maybe seven but I hope eight so that each has a friend. I am provided a warm mulled wine for contemplation while I watch, its branches bundling about themselves in the cold, that kind of air you can only feel for some few minutes as the morning sky begins to brighten. A tender hug of frost. In the bush's late summer leaves, and now in its briar-like winter dress, the little things make the bush look to be constantly bustling in its same place. From inside my house I can hear their persistent chirping, even now, in the Christmas cold. Everyone home for the holidays.

Roll in from the whistling buoy.

Only because Bazan says that he does, I listen to those three songs from Time (The Revelator) on repeat for a few hours. Tracks 5, 9, and 10, that last one fourteen minutes and forty seconds, my goodness. "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand."

Throughout the fall months you talk to a few strangers every couple of weeks named Rob and Barry, and sometimes named Suzanne and Peter--whoever is home, really, during afternoon drop-ins--who for the last stretch have handed cups of sugar, have offered me a way to gain a long-churning simplicity I have yet to sing out, though it's what I've been building.

And, precipitously, I think of grandparents now. Fear can be everywhere, it can be provided for by all things, but not now when, as that one under his "Pigasus" symbol has said, the world is glassed over.

Always sleep with them out.

Fog shows before your every breath, and you walk for blocks. Miles of air so cold you can't feel your hands or the bend of your cheeks. You can't know where your fingertips end and wind begins. That's your nerves in the air, a burning sufficience, where you walk with hands suspended to indefinition.

Wrapped in piano strings.

Ed turned from his computer and told me that I could conquer mountains, that I could conquer the world. That ten years from now the likes of Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth will be asking for my audience. And if only he had someone telling him twenty, thirty years ago what he was telling me now...

He said that two years ago his wife divorced him, and he gave her everything. Fourteen million dollars worth, coming from six patents to his name and four PhDs, and he gave it all to her. He told me that he does not regret it a bit, and that he knew that I would do the same. He could see it in my eyes and could tell by my face. I did not respond, but I think I knew my answer. After they divorced, he started having strokes. Now he has cancer, he said, and next week at the doctor he will find out whether he lives or dies.

It is a flattening sense to feel the world change around you and tell you that you may no longer live as the person you had been. That you have to somehow relearn yourself to fit the contorted shape that those around you are giving. The way that you breathe your air is made obsolete, and every word you use it for is elegiac. I left thinking about that next mountain, and supposing it to be unclimbable. Caged as a man who is told that he now lives only in anecdotes and stories, because your whole being, your breathing body's thoughts, have a status that is not situated anywhere else now but within those tellings. A sudden past, since their location no longer exists for you to live in, and since the present one demands of you a new way to walk. What is a person's location, then, when they walk through days though they know nothing of the path of their upward steps.