North Woods

by Daniel Mason

My God! Until that moment, I had never noticed; it was as if one might subtract all matter but the apple tree and still see, in what remained, the contours of the world.

here, the banks are lined with fantastic ice—columns like organ pipes, bulbs straight from the glassblowers, thin sheets through which one can watch the rising bubbles. Indeed, I have become a connoisseur of ice these days: the sleet that falls like hissing sand, the white that coats the roads like baker’s dustings, the crystalline mesh, thin as spun sugar, that shatters with the passing of my hand. Ah, the whimsy of a God who would deliver water to the earth in the guise of such fine powder! On certain misty days, the clouds leave coats of ragged rime upon the leaves and every single bobbing stalk of winter weed. If only I was so thorough with my canvases.

She had no true interest in the afterlife, except that she was a person whose hunger for the world was greater than what the world provided.

Flowers were what bloomed in scarlet ruffles on red maples, shone opalescent in the leaf duff, bowed, in late September, on golden sprays beneath the weight of bees.