In a half-deserted winter landscape in the Sierra Nevada, a father and son keep building a house while the rest of the crew is gone and the contractor has disappeared. The cold is physical and almost magical: snow falls from a white sky, wind makes their noses run, metal sticks to their hands. The speaker feels small and exposed, but also strangely connected to his father through shared labor. The work feels ancient and unending, “more like Time than Time.” Around them the natural world watches—a junco lands, a coyote yawns on a ridge. The mood is stark, cold, and dreamlike, with a mix of exhaustion, endurance, and quiet intimacy. The final line suggests they have become inseparable from the work itself, as if their lives are simply the wages owed for this hard, repeated effort.
Sierra Nevada: Cold Work Moment — Summary
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.