Snow

Ur-Spo has a post today about missing snow - (He lives in Arizona) - I told him he could come shovel my drive ($35.00 a pop) - Then Butch sent me three videos which point up some of the "fun" about snow and finally Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry is about snow. Max loves the snow - Bailey not so much. He goes outside and sometimes his little body just can't handle it and he limps all the way back to the door. It hurts to watch him. I don't mind the snow. It is the ice I can't handle. I posted last winter about falling when I took the garbage out and having to crawl all the way up the driveway to the house and inside so I could use a chair to get traction to be able to stand up. I hate the fu**ing ice. But the snow is beautiful. Enjoy the movies.







I subscribe to American Life in Poetry and use this today because it fits with the snow post.
American Life in Poetry: Column 193

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

The first two lines of this poem pose a question many of us may have thought about: how does snow make silence even more silent? And notice Robert Haight's deft use of color, only those few flecks of red, and the rest of the poem pure white. And silent, so silent. Haight lives in Michigan, where people know about snow.

How Is It That the Snow

How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?

Some deer have stood on their hind legs
to pull the berries down.
Now they are ghosts along the path,
snow flecked with red wine stains.

This silence in the timbers.
A woodpecker on one of the trees
taps out its story,
stopping now and then in the lapse
of one white moment into another.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2002 by Robert Haight from his most recent book of poetry, "Emergences and Spinner Falls," New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002. Reprinted by permission of Robert Haight. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.