Frontispiece

The book will not start.  
The engine has choked on the Winter's stinging air.  Ice crystals suspended, spinning in the sunlight might crack the windows that reflect the clear blue sky.  There is memory in the steam from our breathing; we can recall the feeling of being warm.

Ahead of us, there is nothing written in this snow, no tracks, the virtuous silence of a blank page.  What looks like hope is actually only possibility.  Time is verbless; space makes no room for a noun.  A sputtering station wagon rests on the railway berm. The book is flooded with this silence, overwhelmed.  Slowly the ambivalent muttering comes up behind it, a ghost ship adrift on this arctic ocean.  Unnamable, it too disappears.  

The book is a 1961 Ford Fairlane, powder-blue, stalled on the train tracks, a family inside, a baby vulnerable, a mother worried.  Somewhere, there is a train unraveling the landscape.  At an uncertain distance and at an uncertain speed, a train is coming and its cars are crowded with words: with explanations, bad poetry, the clipped tongue of a newspaper item, an obituary.  

This piece of paper is in the pocket of a soldier.   He keeps the orders on his person at all times.  This train is delivering the next intercontinental ballistic missile to its bunker that lies beneath the brooding snow.  Everything is waiting for something to happen--the car to start, the war to begin, the baby to wake up to the  penetrating cold with that inconsolable cry.  Meanwhile we look out the frosted glass at the rolling hills, the surface nervously shifting, white sands licking the wind that keeps pushing east.   What passed for life in summer is now well-buried, embalmed by snow on the Rocky Mountain front.