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Nothing’s thawed, only shattered. The verdant’s humbled under the freeze, as not much more than a sign, foretelling of symbol…a future down and dormant, entombed in ice, season’s promise without warming to fulfillment. If promise is the redemption, then fulfillment is the Law; this is our tradition. In the clock that is its cycle, it’s the season of Exodus — in a more obliging time, the season that would stream dew down to the valley of the faithful, to flow its flight past blackened cataracts of spoiled manna, then over and around the desert winding itself its clay bed as serpentine as sin, to pool at the foot of Sinai, shining like a star under a latter moon; summer’s slow absorption of the wetted, wetting season: the weather and the Law, inseparable, of the same womb, that of Hanna’s Hanna. As a babe borne to His first spring atop this ancient rush, in a basket woven of His eyelashes floated atop a river of His tears — so early in life that everything’s a first, a fresh discovery, a blessing lying in the waiting, twophrased at the crossroads: first face toward the Great Hall, then bow, and then toward His house above the ice, to bow again at its path of slate, its driveway of tar, freshly shoveled daily…to holy every revelation’s what’s required, if not for Ben’s survival then to make their deaths more real — no matter how meager, no matter the futility involved. He divines the smoke from the fire, and differences the earth from the unappealable ice. And so He knows, as much, this season for what it is, for what it’s become, and so for what’s forsaken — this spring isn’t about rejuvenation, regeneration, a new compact, or covenant renewed: this disillusioning moon, it marks only a season more, another loneliness starmocked, shone deeper into the empty soul of life.

A last twinkling, then darkness.

As it will never be written: when cycles are stilled, their memories go on with their turning, overturning; then what was of this world is called inside, is locked indoors, sent to its room, to toss diurnal in colorful, too clowny sheets. Know this — that we live despite the season, its weather, the wasteful, wasting time. That we live because we stay inside — that only with roof and walls are our lives saved; on the lawn and behind its fence, the car parked, the gutters blooming, there we erect our truest Temple. As courses are made ritual, the rise and set of sun get timed to the face of a higher clock; its hands of rays spin, realigned, to tick away our time…until — an emergence…revelation, an inspired sensing. As a mensch more than any otherness is both a part in a mechanism and an individual, a mechanism unto himself, both the cog of the clock and the clock itself with its two gnarled hands: one shorter to pull toward, opposite one longer to push away, that and the feet of a lion and with the tail of a viper, the time Ben spends in the Garden is made other from any hour known, is off the daily schedule. His are days sat out in this house alone He’s trashing, destroying, bringing it to the collapse of ruin: a house adrift on an Island floating in an ocean set in His sink, in the kitchen His mother once ruled as queen, out from under the timing scepter of her king — the third hand of the clock, pointing time independent and so perhaps to us erratically, but no less regulated, still within the same system, rooted to the same immaculacy and intellection, its floating face…squared by the lower tennis courts, their balls starring lazily over the nets windfallen, in the division of armies for snowball wars; the slides have been repurposed; the seesaws reeducated into catapults of frost; though the bases be stolen, no one has it in them to escape.

Indoors quick — and hide.