Snow, Man, and'The Snow Man' Makes it Better! Behold Nothing That is Not There!

Well, so far I have had to use the trusty old MTD ( recently serviced by the estimable Mike Green) this winter.

We have been promised Snowmageddon again.  The Farmer's Almanac predicted a real bone snapper.

Thus far, but a dusting this A.M. - can't worry about accumulation. All a body can rightly do is praise the Lord and plow.

It's winter neighbors.  We get snow.

Here is a brilliant way to get over ourselves and revel in God's winter weather work - The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;  

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter  

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,  

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place  

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Like a snow man, Stevens built upon three - five triplet stanzas.  Each 'snowman' relies upon 'perspective.'  We each and everyone of us look at the cold hard facts out there and each of us comes away with a different perspective.  The facts are supposed to dominate us, like a Tom Skilling warning of 'temperatures at Zero and wind chills down to negative fifteen.'  Tell that to a troop of eight St. Cajetan fifth grade boys on a snow day and the chance to sled down Beacon Hill at 107th & Longwood Drive.  Tell that to their teachers who have a day off! McNally's, Ladies!

Science, hard facts and snow mean something.  Never the same thing.

Just Cuz.

Duke Wright!


Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
By Wallace Stevens

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.