How beautiful the snow blasted world

Snow falls quietly at twilight
gathering flakes whisper as they hit the window

How beautiful the snow blasted world. 

After dinner the snow stops falling and the dog and I go out to walk the territory. The moon glows faintly behind a scrim of clouds; clumps of snow cling to every branch and bush and the tops of the flattened grasses.  The apple trees thrust their branches at the sky like so many gnarled and knobby fists; there's a gaping hole where the barn door has blown off--better call for help to fix that one. 

We circle the gardens, step through the weeds to the pond's edge, where a fallen tree covered in snow casts strange shadows on the ice.  No footprints but ours anywhere to be seen. 

We walk along the dyke at the sea edge, each rose hip a huge ball of snow on a spindly branch. There's just enough wind that we can hear the water ripping and rushing into the shore and out again.

The wind is biting. It nips my cheek, hurries the dog to the door, slips through the stitching in my gloves to freeze my fingers. But I'm not ready to go in yet.

Clouds scud across the sky.  I look out over the grey water towards the islands, invisible in the darkness, then turn to scrape off the cars and clear the drive in front of the garage, savouring the sharpness of the air, stamping my feet to keep them warm.  Why must every pair of boots leak? Time to goop them up again.

I am remembering one night when I was about nine. The snow had been falling all evening. The streets were quiet and huge drifts covered the yard.  My siblings and I were sure that when our mother came into the room, she was going to tell us to get ready for bed. It's time, she said, pausing as we started to moan, then all in a rush--to get your coats on and go play in the snow! Shrieking with delight, we tumbled out into the darkness and the drifts, the world magical and thick with surprise and permission. 

It wasn't until I moved to Montreal and learned to cross-country ski twenty years after that--and more than twenty years ago--setting out across the fields of the Chateauguay Valley beneath a full moon, that falling snow occasioned such delight and anticipation again. But now it does.  

I watch the snow mount up higher and higher and hope the thermometer drops, rather than rises, so that I can ski across the bog, over top of the little lakes and streams, the sheepskill and the insect-eating pitcher plants onto the bushy ledges where the coyotes circle and sing.  There, I'll clamber up to a point where I can stand and look out at the sea rolling unimpeded over the horizon; from there, it rolls all the way to Spain. 

I can only ever get to that place on skis, when the bog is frozen and overlaid with deep snow.  How glorious it will be if that's what tomorrow brings.

Notes
Photos taken 3 January 2017 in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Milk

6 April 2013
 
Why is milk good?
        Gertrude Stein, “Say it with flowers”

First play
So much milk
rivers of milk
my milk runneth over
    you mean your cup

    yes, a cup of milk for your thoughts

Second play
spilt milk
milksop
milk and honey and tea
milky t
milquetoast

don't sour my milk now

Third play
Here comes the milkman!
    Milkman who?
    Milkman Dead.
    He is?
       
Oh mother, we’re out of
milk again.   

Fourth play
Born in a stroke of milk
    mother’s milk
    father’s milk
under the milkweed

    (too rough for fishing today)

Fifth play
Hurry hurry, the sick won't wait
bring your brolly &
milk of magnesia

But I prefer jelly
&
poems.


(Last Act)
I photographed this shelf of cobalt blue bottles last summer in Billy Proctor's Museum on Gilford Island, Echo Bay, BC.  For more on Echo Bay, Billy Proctor and his museum, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/the-sound-of-something-vanishing-billy-procter/

The idea for dividing a poem into discrete exchanges or actions, each of which you might call a play--rather than a stanza--is borrowed from Gertrude Stein's early experiments with writing plays, in which heavy formal titles divide snatches of overheard conversation and wordplay. See for example, her Geography and Plays, first published in 1922.

Milkman Dead is a character in Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon, the boy who won't be weaned, and who then flies away.

The lines "too rough for fishing today" and the idea of visiting the sick with jelly and poems are taken from Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas's 1953 poem/play about the events of a single spring day in  lives of the coastal villagers of Llareggub, Wales. The piece, which is written as poem, radio play ("a play for voices") and for stage performance,  is filled with dreams and ghosts, inward musings and overheard gossip; it is a more highly structured, evolved, and palatable form of the sorts of play/poems Stein wrote.




(Last last act)
Why is milk good?
Is it?

Learning to Stand On Our Heads

25 October 2010

I'm in Ohio, and my niece and her friend want to learn to stand on their heads. 

I show them how to make a tripod consisting of two hands or elbows and the head. We practice.  I do stand on my head--I can--but I haven't thought to do so for years. 

And so I begin to wonder--when do we lose the enthusiasm for such dramatic shifts in perspective and in the orientations of our bodies?  At eight, most of us thirst for such upside-down intensities.  But scrape adulthood and all of our dignity gets vested in staying upright.  --Or, if we do now and then stand on our heads, it is within the context of a practice, like yoga, or anti-gravity exercises, and not for the sheer glee of seeing our feet in the clouds. 

It's a pity--and why hanging out with kids can be such fun.  They're so inventive and so erratic.  And honestly, who doesn't need to balance her head on the ground now and then?


Image
Rachael DuLaney in the leaves--or are the leaves on Rachael?  
Thanks Rachael for all of your laughter and great ideas!