In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

Hell ain't half full.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.