by Rudolf Koppitz
“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” ~ Wallace Stevens, from “The Snow Man”
Tuesday afternoon. Clear and cold, 31 degrees.
We were hit with snow, sleet, and freezing rain yesterday and into the night, so of course the whole area is shut down. It’s quiet, though. Funny how you don’t notice the quiet until it’s there.
I always love waking up after snow because there is a blue light hovering outside the windows and a dampening of all of the grating sounds of cars and trucks and noise in general. But I was reminded of my father last night as Corey was complaining of being cold: My father, who hated winter, hated snow, hated the cold . . . my father who would rather stay on a ship thousands of miles away for months at a time rather than be in a city blanketed with winter.
by Valerius de Saedeleer
Too Much Snow
Unlike the Eskimos we only have one word for snow but we have a lot of modifiers for that word. There is too much snow, which, unlike rain, does not immediately run off. It falls and stays for months. Someone wished for this snow. Someone got a deal, five cents on the dollar, and spent the entire family fortune. It’s the simple solution, it covers everything. We are never satisfied with the arrangement of the snow so we spend hours moving the snow from one place to another. Too much snow. I box it up and send it to family and friends. I send a big box to my cousin in California. I send a small box to my mother. She writes “Don’t send so much. I’m all alone now. I’ll never be able to use so much.” To you I send a single snowflake, beautiful, complex and delicate; different from all the others.
~ Louis Jenkins
by Graham Noble Norwell
Smelling the Snow
I’ve heard it said
there are those on such
close terms with night
they can smell the very light.
Not only does the moon,
they say, give off a scent
nothing like the sun’s,
but old moon smells
sweeter than slivered new.
Monks of old claimed sin
took the breath away, while
God was wild onion, lilac, pine.
I know a carpenter who
boasts he can sniff out a maple
in a woodlot of ash and oak.
A stalking cat knows
the unsinging sparrow
from the finch. This day
as it returns to Ohio, like
some feathery creature
seeking the very moon and tree
where it was born,
I can smell the snow,
which seems to me,
against the dark trees
moving in slow procession,
a few birds stark and silent,
an essence close to love.
But any old fool can smell love.
~ David Citino
Music by Joan as Police Woman, “To Survive”
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 