Salt

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         We use salt for snow and we use salt for spirits, for ghosts and gheists, for the haunted and the haloless. “Be like salt,” they say and I think, “What am I to melt today?” Do I melt the dead, the clinging rage, the fear and failure gripping tight, the howling remnants of the consequences of numbering yourself among dead men walking? Do I meet that fear, that failure, those emotions running higher and higher til they whirlwind out into terrible personification? Or do I fight the fingerless, groping cold that comes gentle and soft and creeping on little frost feet, ready to numb and make naked, to make nobody of delicate, hot-blooded man, to stop his heart’s pumping and the pressure of life holding cells and senses tightly bounded into being.

    Spirits melt and snow gains savor. The cold and the calloused, the hungry and the groping desperately for life, for fire, for flavor, for crystals of Christ given in bounty, are fed.

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