from MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL: NOVEMBER 20, 1998

Another November sky,

the certain grey cast of it. The certainty and squareness of our lives, the stubbornness of our desires. We will bull our way through the coming winter - we do it again and again, though sometimes we might complain. Our complaints about the weather are like chatter on the baseball field, a refuge against loneliness. Talk it up out there. "Hey batta batta. Hang it in there now, hang it in there."

A stiff, chill wind. A dark blue tinge to the clouds at the ends of the earth. The last green leaves of a bush are curled and brittle. Life is short and brutish and lovely.

There is more traffic this morning than usual, heading north, in big enough a hurry it has to pass me:

If I'm going too slow,
maybe you're going too fast;
the last shall be first
and the first shall be last.

In his tree, the hawk is calm and steely-eyed and eternal. He is there in all his thereness, watching.

I am in the hawk all the way to Five Corners, all the way to Ripon. I try to see what he's seeing; to see, as if my life depended on it. I cannot get that deep into him.

Our language is a code. Our rituals are. Our gestures. The distance we stand from each other is a code. The way we touch. The way one cups a breast, strokes the inner aspect of her thigh. The way the school girl tosses her head as she crosses Watson Street in front of me. Code. I don't always understand it. I am not always understood.

Very fine gritty flakes of snow are flying on the wind by the time I park the pick-up in the lot in front of our printing plant. It is November. Grey. Eternal.