Imagining It
by Kate Barnes At eighteen, in Paris, I just woke up out of a dream just before dawn, and stepped through the long window from my cold room with its red silk walls. Shivering a little in my dressing gown, I leaned on the balustrade and, look, overnight a light snow had fallen; no car had driven over it yet, it lay in the street as white, as innocent, as snow on the open fields. Then something approached with a calm rhythm of hoof-beats made softer by the snow, the sound of a quiet heart. It was a heaped-up wood cart pulled by a gray horse who walked along slowly, head down, while the driver sat at the back of one shaft and hunched over to light his cigarette. From above, I saw clearly the lit match in the old man's cupped hands, its glow on his long jaw, the small well of flame between his living palms like the flare of the soul in his body. He went on down the street, and the sky went on growing lighter, and I saw how he left his dark tracks behin...