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prick, her eyes would show no more emotion than my own bulging eyes in the flickering black window of the commuter train. Suppose my heart decided to flip shut—to knock off for an eternity-long coffee break—at this moment. Would the deer come and sniff curiously, would the smell of my hair still frighten her, would the universe branch and carry me intact into another portion of endless space? Are the funnel vortices of black holes the passageways whereby we enter the afterlife?
    But I was already on another planet. Each step a comical struggle, I fought my way to the pole on its little flagstoned platform—a conceit of the previous owner, a nautical man who loved to stand and take in his view of Massachusetts Bay. I dug down to where the ends of the Christmas light cords had been pegged or tied to a handy bush. The experience was archaeological, really, and made me feel, as my numb fingers grappled at the knots, the cold connection between the buried and the present.
    So much snow wraps the world in cosmic feeling. The euonymus hedge, no longer defenseless, is rounded in its thick white armor like a futuristic motor vehicle. A transcendent sparkle rides the surface; microscopic icy prisms send rainbows to my retinas. I am immersed in the white blind brute reality of nature, heartless and beautiful. I am in the rushing waterfall, the thunderhead cradle of blue new stars in a proximate galaxy. Beneath the dazzling skin of snow, a whole lost world waited to be born again, its details—blades of grass, pegs holding knotted ropes—faithfully tucked into the realm of the potential. I coiled the strings of Christmas lights, stiff and lumpy with ice, into their cardboard box and carried the box to the third floor. From the third-floor windows I looked for deer tracks, but of course there were none. She must be huddled in the tent-shaped shelter beneath a hemlock, the wet dark orb of her eye watchful. To stick a pin into that bulging eye—that would be a wicked thrill, a tunnel into another world.
    Instead of deer tracks I saw curious paths between the trees, the oaks around the driveway, from one trunk to another, and then vanishing, bat-shaped dents in the snow. It took me surprisingly long to deduce that these were the body-prints of squirrels, only half hibernating, quickly floundering from one tree to another. But what makes them think one tree might be an improvement over another? A bed of grass in one, a cache of acorns in another. Like rich Manhattanites, they scuttle from Park Avenue to Wall Street and back, minimizing their moments on the ground. On this scorched planet we human beings are not yet quite alone; there is still other life. Squirrels, rats, deer, the last rhinos and cheetahs. Insects, of course, in their undismayable selfless multitudes.
    And then the next day, or the next, awaking too early, unsettledby the hyperactive, menacing weather—Gloria is falling in love with the different channels’ weathermen, and can tell them all apart—I was walking in the pre-dawn semi-dark down to the mailbox, where the delivery man throws the newspaper, sparing himself the trouble of our driveway. Above me a two-thirds moon hung in a sky already blue. I looked up at this apparition and tried to see it as it is, a ball in space, illuminated by a single light-source. The direction of the source was clearly indicated by the way the light lay; it was somewhere over my shoulder. The sun was in the southeast but not yet risen. I tried to make myself realize that the moon was hoisted into the same light that had not yet touched me; there is no other light; it soaks the inner solar system, in whose interplanetary spaces there is no night and day; and this light would not soon be lifting over the horizon behind my left shoulder, beyond the cluster of quaintly named local islands, but in fact the surface I am standing on and all surface continuous with it to the horizon of the sea and beyond was plunging forward the sun, like