The Endless One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— Emily Dickinson (poem 670)
M. Brogan It’s snowing here where I am and I’ve gone out to stand between the red spruce and Pennsylvania pines to smoke a cigarette. I can hear the snow fall and the Allegheny whisper down below as it passes old towns and forgotten campfires. I could really be anywhere, but I am here, dug into the snow with a shovel, and a wool blanket wrapped around my back. I pretend you put it there, but the fire has long gone out and now mud stands where ashes once were. The scent of burnt leaves and wool and breath circle around my nose. I have come here to bury superstitions. My glasses begin to fog up so I take them off. It reminds me of the time we were hiking in the Carpathians and I couldn’t see you any longer in front of me, so I stopped for a moment to try and dry my lenses off, but my sweater was soaked with sweat. When I looked up, you were a moving blur up ahead on the trail, slowly yet steadily going away, and I thought about calling out to you, but let the moment pass and took a long swig from my canteen instead. That night we became friends with a stray dog and drank mulled wine in a hut with a mountain man of few words. The memory of it makes me smile. It is a series of clips with no words, as if the sound were turned off. I can’t remember what we said to one another. I can only feel my feet unwilling to thaw, smell the wood splitting open in the stove and cloves and cinnamon in the hot
wine, and see the fog as it settled over the dark forested mountains, meaning colder weather was coming in. It is a story I want to write down, but I can never write the first word. Now I stand in snow, the wool blanket around me catching flakes on its fuzz. There is house behind me, one I had built and we always come back to. It’s small with a cobblestone fire place and a creaking porch, it has only one floor and two rooms, and the kitchen can’t fit a table. It is hidden high up in these mountains, in the highlands of Appalachia, where mining and drilling for oil were lifelines, but now are abandoned holes in the earth. This is what the first settlers once called the “frontier,” and you and I called a “small wilderness.” You’re back inside the house now, cooking something on the gas stove. I think I can hear the whistle of the tea pot, and you moving around swiftly, wasting no time, no space; you were always good at that sort of thing: doing, making, moving. The sound of your movement is comfort. The familiarity stretches out towards me like open arms and I forget that I am cold. You are always putting things away and I am always standing somewhere, like now, looking up at a darkening sky. I close my eyes as if I can sleep out here and suddenly we’re in a bar, hiding from a torrential thunderstorm, in some small town, in some obscure place we’ll later call one of our homes 17
