It has stopped and there is nothing underneath it

or at least that is my fear, that it has coated everything and erased, replaced it. All that is left of the world is relief of what was there before. The echo of a form. The mold for it. So we can replace it, remake it. Make it new. Make it nothing like we've seen before. Make it in the old and odd world's image.

I think of murder, a little. Of bodies felled and left in the hundreds of thousands of square miles of woods, of those who waited just a little while too long or found themselves too many footsteps away from home, or with no sense of where North is in the middle of it, and no GPS or GRE or orienteering maps for reference. Those who lay down there, hoping for something more to come and save them. Hoping for the light to penetrate the gusting haze. Hoping for the dog with rum to come and lap their faces back to life. Maybe that's not murder but something else. The slow moan of suicide. Or accident. Or dumbassitude. Transfixed by beauty, a kind of transfiguration, effortless, a butterfly fixed by a pin to brooding cork.

Or when the trees creak with their sheaths of ice in the wind, and you can hear drunks returning home from the bars a half a mile away, rowdy and bleeding from the fall they won't remember until they get home and smear their sheets and wake up the next morning refreshed and surprised.