Caoilinn Hughes
Avalanche
When the avalanche came down on us
it
did not come down on us in a holy light,
flickering
between this dimension and another
ultraviolet
one. It did not shower its sermon upon us
in
meaning-ful, vowel-less sounds like stalactites.
It
did not come down on us at all. It came up, up, over
and
around us; all around us in a pall. It met our bodies
in
a hail, hail, hail, not a wall but heavier than water
if
we were sitting at the bottom of the sea. We heard it crack
and
sizzle on the ground. It filled the valley like a steam engine;
its
clotted vapour urging forward to some terminus beyond us.
We
watched it soar and could not inhale enough air between
the
screams. Our lungs made fists. I thought of lips freezing shut
once
and for all, the uncommon cold, no human fingers to close
the
lids nor chance of rescuing the bodies, stiff as candy canes
striped
red, white, red, white, grey. Your hands were fifty feet away,
your
mind another hundred. My cries could not contend with this parade
of
physics. You were wordless, as if the snow were slow motion surf
or
a weir devouring its atmosphere. Was it fluid dynamics, glaciology
or
meteorology you surveyed? There was something of the shock
wave
about it, no doubt about that. The space between us
prolonged.
I should never have collapsed in love with a physicist.
I
saw the fort my brother built from bales of hay, whose tunnel
should
never have been trusted. Oh, to make a hay citadel!
‘When
the fields are white with daisies,’ my father would have said.
The
ice wave rose and darkness fell. I doubted how well my elbows
would
act as pick-axes, if it were to be a catacomb. I had once been told
that
knowing which way is up is key: that the whiteness is homogeneous;
that
people dig madly, burying themselves in the immortal white. I
panicked:
would
he have a better chance than I, with his gall; his practicality?
No,
the snow was nothing like confetti. It would not applaud any small
boys
or
any small girls, no matter how insolent. We braced ourselves,
finally.
Later,
you described the form of a loose snow avalanche as a teardrop;
born
of some great disparity between the tensile gift of snow layers
and
their compressive heft. The angle of repose was soft, you allowed,
as we stood in the catchment area, making observations and vowel sounds.