frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.