Poem (with apologies to Blake): Waiting for snow

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All of November nearly gone, and not a snowfall worth chatting about around the office water cooler. Cooled water, harumph! I want snow. We went to see the Nutcracker the other night. Lovely, you know. The dance of the snowflakes just beautiful, and the Snow King and Queen. But, harumph!

I wander around the meadow path, and all I can find is evergreen and brown. Where is the harsh winter that was promised, huh?

In my snowlust, I walked and could not get "The Tyger" out of my head, though that is about stars and tigers and the Creator and what is simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. I thought about my recovering mother-in-law and the proximity of terror and joy: almost gone, then in a day or two sprouting jokes and love. The air was cold, and I kept thinking about the tearful symmetry of snowflakes, and the dancing ones in Nutcracker, and the rhythm of my feet on the ground that was beating out rhyming, metered verse. Like this. (Seriously, my apologies to Wm. Blake for this.)

Waiting for snow

Snowflake, snowflake, come to me

down the spiral of this breeze;

where on mountains do you hide—

in Shambhala, or Telluride?

In what distant keeps or skies

swirl the centers of your eyes;

white unseen, at heights too high

for me to catch, or eat, or slide.

And your Winter, where is She,

poet Mistress of Tchaikovsky?

And when the Finns flop onto ice,

wouldn’t some for me be nice?

Where the crystals? where the drifts,

in what hollow blues my bliss?

And where does power click and fail

under avalanche and gale!

While the blizzard puffs the tree

in Anchorage and Nikiski,

Michigan wind just blows us bare:

the birds and I, we perch and stare.

Snowflakes, snowflakes on the stage,

bobbing tulle in a silver haze;

groove the dance, chill the Queen;

sift powdered sugar on these evergreens!

The Muse of Winter another year

If the ballet doesn't work,
there's always Ahmad Jamal

playing "Snowfall" at the Alhambra in London;
for something kind of cool, load the YouTube video,
turn the volume down a fair bit and listen to me read
my poem on podcast here with Jamal playing in the background.

:-)

William Blake's "The Tyger"

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