The snow visits us, taking little bits of us with it, to become part of the earth, an early death and an early return—like the filing of tax forms. And all you can say after adding up column after column: “I’m not myself.” And all you can say after the long night of searching for one certain scrap of paper: “It never existed.” And when all the lamps are lit and the smell of the stew has followed you upstairs and slipped under the door of your study: “The lute is telling the story of the life I might have lived, had I not—” In my study, which is without heat, in mid-January, in the hills of a northern province—only the thin white-haired volumes of poetry speak, quietly, like unfed birds on a night visit to a cat farm. And an airplane is lost in a storm of fitting pins. The snow falls, far into the interior.