17 january · winter · beaufort 2
the january wind
the january wind is a date, not a direction. it arrives, in this place,
on or about the seventeenth, and only then. some years it does not come.
the years in which it does not come are noted, in the
almanac, with a thin line through the day.
it carries the smell of paper and of a quiet office. it is the wind under
which calendars are taken down and put up. it is the wind, also, under
which one looks at the year just begun and observes — with no particular
emotion — that it will pass. the building, on its day, becomes very
slightly larger inside, the way a room feels after a guest has left.
indoors it sounds like the page of a library book
turning by itself. lamps left on in empty rooms gutter once. a clock on
a north wall, by long tradition, is wound under it. memory
in the january wind takes a step back so it can be looked at.
field note · v · last january, the door of the small office opened, in the seventeenth hour, with no one near it. nothing in the office had moved. only the date on the desk calendar, which had, somehow, advanced a day.