The Blissard

~ Will Zell
Painting by Will Zell – oil on canvas

Paths were hardly passable
all entrance stopped, snuffed or halted
plow trucks leaving ruts like scars

No phase of yellow buses cycled
Workers left in frosted cars
‘till all was still beneath her sill …untill

a solo shoveler started
re-arranging her peace
of snow blessed sidewalk

suggesting one other
then three …
all too many more.

She could sit in her chair for
hours in the morning
bare with mind on nothing

while coated trees weighed branches down
wind arranging drifts
amidst the block with power out

this housemate simply sits.
Lovely, blue eyed, deep she gazes
through her attic dormer

with eyelids half awakening
to bundled figures chiselling
straight and narrow lines

marking out vague boundaries
by sidewalks
and illegible signs

within the circuit
of their plodding life
leaving walls on either side.

One after the other
emerging from garages
wielding tools at bay

clearing paths to their mailbox
or digging out objects
on their missing driveway

a uniform whiteness
sparkles like stars
but seldom noticed that way

they, appeared exhausted
from her attic floor
so pleased with the sense of freedom

puffing jets of steam from frozen mouths
with no place they could go.
Was it a miracle to see one’s breath?

Once all the shoveling ended
she watched them shuffle back into their hollows
hands pulling down heavy doors that followed.

Then simply, the undamned sky resumed
no wintry mix of ingratitude
as again so sweetly their pathways filled with snow.

This was partly why
she would sit in her wingback chair
bare with mind on nothing, for hours.

In widening to the world about her
the glowing intensity cf the snow
stained her retina.

The image of the window with its crosshairs
pulsated where ever she aimed
and shot her head.

While out in the front yard
the hemlocks
bowed to snow

through the diamond shaped holes
of a chain link fence
a stream of seven sparrows flow

in crisp finesse
as dots of musical jazz
improvising amidst this fallen silence

as the world in this moment
in the flight of birds piercing muffled white noise
with all the world’s song

she rarely saw
much of anything wrong
when the beauty of earth

blew back her hair
as her heavenly body
sank deep in her chair.

For her world
could rest
in the palm of her hand.

She the center of stillness
within her own woman left command
of the house she sat

family un-returned
tenuously attached in spider webs
on photos on walls about her.

Like an insect’s abdomen
shifted as she did
in her un-realized abandonement

a tinge of restlessness, a strangeness
preheating the psychic weather
affecting her error, teasing the web

by her herky efferent gestures
resembling alarm
a sketch of herself loosened from its place on the wall

and swung to the floor
by the cold limp snake
plugging a draft at her door.

This was no mistake.
To inanimate objects that moved by themselves
she’d acclaim prophetic significance

lean back in her chair
laugh at this visual romance
this intimate creative circumstance

asking aloud, expecting an answer,
“Where are these places
that show through me?”

“Who?
… are these beings
I’ve drawn?”

As an artist she drew upon
our earth as it moved on through her
expressing the pleasures of miracles

forests, flowers, changing skies
and the face of all its creatures
in color and in motion

all with horizons of oceans beyond
drawn like the scratches
by skaters on iced ponds.

“I am here”
she ‘d say to herself
a seeding phrase

her key to the instant
to open up
the forces inherent in the moment.

willing
to share, reveal
or not

priming her art
like the feeding of white blood cells through marrow
images on the brink of meaning

her boney shyness
and her legs in a knot
from sitting on siting

in the same holy spot
with not even a man
to be got

yet as pregnant and growing
as a freshly laid ground
on a drum stretched cotton canvas.

Staring out her blurred glass
blank
with nothing to gather, save or remove …

… in porous waiting.
The glare of the snow
stained her focus

burning a blind spot
on her optic nerve
a dot on the snowscape now unobserved

trudging towards her house on the hill
making his path
that the winds quickly filled.

“What’s the point?”
she’d chant to herself
as “Who’s the point?” came closer.