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| HAPPY SNOW by Su Smallen “Once I have left a cup in the sink to signify that The last warmth of its body fitted the snow to the squirrel. Tucked into snow like packing material, though unpackaged. The squirrel lies with its left paw resting on its high, dead, heart. There are no tracks, no prints—the umbilical cords of snow angels; there is no leaving trail. This snow angel is keeping quite close to its maker.
The squirrel’s legs and arms are frozen as if boxing, its tail unfrozen still boxing the breeze. At 28 squirrel-lengths east, and at a right angle up to an unknown height, the breeze boxes a nest-bough. What force directed the hypotenuse of the squirrel’s fall? Some things will not be made sense of, and others, the sense we make of them is false. Someone said squirrels do not remember where they bury their food, that what they unbury is by chance. If true, then squirrels prepare a field of chance. We prepare a field of sense, then, whether that has helped us or not, we proceed into winter, foraging. Death is not the enemy but the ghosti, “someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality.” Guest and host, latch bar and notch, particle and wave, event and narrative.
The weight of souls is enough to counter-balance, enough mass added to a body to diminish the power draw of gravity. When the soul releases, mass is lost, gravity is unchallenged, the body drops to the ground. There is a force called—we don’t know what it is called, I shall call it love—that pulls us from above, an antigravity. In snow we should see the umbilici of snow angels. Snow is the detective’s ash. Without it, the cords, the safety straps are invisible to us. We are lost, untuned by scent or vision or whiskers for tracking. We are lost. We feel lost. (We are not lost.) The magnet in our souls swings, its compass needle swings until it finds its north, its love force, the north of its force that we are calling love (having no reason against calling it love.) The weight of a soul, its mass, is this magnet. This snow fitting the squirrel inversely reveals the mass of a soul. The lack of a trail in the snow is enough proof that there is no trail. It proves that we should look up. Something has caused the hypotenuse of the squirrel’s fall.
We must look up and question. This is our happiness; it is what we are fitted to. The unknown is cut like snow and fitted to us.
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Nor are there tracks to it. A perfect cell, nuclear corpse, without genesis. So the squirrel imprinted itself with its weight, not its warmth, saying, “To claim my soul equity, I throw myself down, O Death!” 
The squirrel’s body presses into snow, then, in warmer days, it presses into water, into earth, making a cloth of fibers of squirrel, water, earth. More earth, more cloth that wraps around water, tectonic plates, particles, fire, energy, vibration. 
We must look up and question the hypotenuse. What this means for us. If anything means. It is our experience of things that causes them to be related in our experience. This is spiritual stereopsis. Our poetical brains will interpret any two images as depth perception. Everything means. 