Sierra Nevada: Cold Work Moment

In a sense it’s always winter in this wooded county of our psyche, where my father and I build a house, the rest of the crew off drunk somewhere.

The contractor has taken blueprints and a cash advance to Reno. A white sky pays out kernels of snow. My father saws.

I nail. Partitions take ghostly shape. In the forest of our days, coyotes eat bread crumbs we scattered to find our way back to where we left for work.

We lift walls into iron wind, and brace. Ropes of snot come out of our noses. Sierra cold’s meticulous. It polishes our eyeballs like a monocled jeweler.

One junco, round as a musical note, lands on a board. In this shift, we share a willed, relentless push against work, which is endless, more like Time than Time.

Our hands stick to metal we pick up. Say in this work-moment howling witches fly down from glacial diorite Buttes. Say maybe God leans closer or pivots away.

We’re smaller than an echo of traveling geese. I know my father in the white meadow of work. Women have always been more sensible than men. Up there on a ragged ridge a coyote yawns.

I feel as if we are the wages we are due.