Standing alone in the sunlight of a downtown Albany afternoon, the snowman stared without eyes or expression – an expression in innocence and terror at once. Bereft of company, forlorn of animated spirit, the snowman stands still, stoically unmoved by the shifting wind or diminishing light. We do not know if it will last the night – people tend to destroy that which brings others joy – one of our more miserable failings as a species.
Stuff of childhood imagination, stiff of nightmarish winter-scapes – the snowman offers no explanation to its existence. He wasn’t there one moment, and the next he was. He will be gone again in much the same infuriating fashion. There one moment, not there the next, and absence erasing all, better than any melting thaw might do, and more complete than any destructive marauders who would fell a snow crystal creature.
The snowman saves his secrets, pocketing them in invisible pockets, sublimating their worth from ice directly to air, not bothering to wade through its watery, melting bloodline. Ancestry of a snowman is quintessentially tricky to determine, so scattered does the lineage break and branch. Molecularly, all must be related – anything beyond that, anything deeper, is too difficult to determine; the cloudy obscurity of winter, this winter in debilitating particular, refuses to clear up its mystery. All that I’ve tried to bring into relief and focus falling apart like the flimsiest emotional constructs.
Still the snowman stands in silence.
Still the snowman stays in secret.
Still the snowman…
Still the snowman.
