Winter at last: nostalgia

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Lately, my thoughts want to come out in poems. I don't know what has happened, it's never been like this before. I think I just long for an economy of words. I am also reading more poems than anything else. Mary Oliver. Rainer Maria Rilke. Rumi. Charles Bukowski. Mark Strand. Whatever Garrison Keillor offers in the daily Writer's Almanac. The poems you write. Or, if I read a book or an article, I read them in short bursts, as if a paragraph is a prose poem. I force myself to read a few Op Eds in the NY Times or BBC online. Have you ever read David Brooks or Paul Krugman with an eye to metaphor? OK, I just clicked on the Opinion page to find some good metaphors to show you what I mean, and guess what? Paul Krugman's piece today is titled: Block those Metaphors. I'm not kidding, it happened just like that, synchronously. Is he saying he doesn't want me to co-opt his column as poetry?

Anyway. When the snow finally arrived on the weekend, I felt at ease, at last. A poem-memory slid out. Also, because of the nostalgia, I turned the photos sepia. Don't get me wrong. I love the blue of winter, and I'll show you plenty of it in the months to come. But for this first snowfall, let me take you back . . .

Winter at last

When at last she comes

in the middle of December

Winter pulls our old toboggan of bamboo

by its curled bow

like a come-hither finger

“Sorry I’m late”

and in red and black woolens

I climb onto the vinyl pad

with three older brothers

me pocketed in the imperial front seat

of the curl

muscled by their weight behind

secure in their brotherly oar-like legs

shoving off the hill into the wild white

like Norse Vikings, my seven-year-old face

the brave winter-fairy figurehead

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