Full of snow & fire

Snowed in yet again another day in upstate Wyoming.

The perfect day to work on my imperfect novel until I come to the perfect place to stop.

When I stop writing it starts snowing books in the cabin, a regular blizzard

I check my phone. I see a poet has sent me something, electronically. They're poems and he wants me to look at them. So I'll have to look at them, whether I really want to or not, because he's a good poet and an even bettter person and I don't how to tell him no. He's expecting me to say something intelligent about his poems, but if I mean to be honest with him I'll have to tell him I'm in a place right now where all my intelligence, what little I have, is going into myself, not into others.

I've talked to no one for two days, I've seen no one, I've been all bundled up in the self, walking from room to room through the cabin like it's a cave full of manuscripts I'll never finish reading or writing. The cabin's now almost fifteen years old, difficult to believe. 

The phrase, snowed in comes to me over and over but I don't know what to do with it.

I've brought a boxful of books from San Francisco; I must have had a premonition.

I pick up one book after another, read  for awhile and then read another and another. Books are all over the cabin, the giants of world literature--Asian and American, French, English, German--novels and books of poems, essays, memoirs--all so great as to be readable for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes...then what?

It's silent when it snows, really silent. The kind of silence you don't want to step on. When snow's falling you can actually hear it; snow sounds like fire at the exact moment it catches fire.