At Home in the Snow

I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places
-Frost, ‘Desert Places’

Now a downy snow floats down as I stare outside my window,
Only half awake and aware, at most, but lonely enough to know
How each slow flake is bound to be one with those on the ground-
So many ghosts to notice fall, though I fear I’m far more one than all.

*

While witnessing this whiteness, musing much but missing in the meanwhile life
(Its visits and vistas I’d like to greet with a bliss equal to this misery I meet with),
I vie with my mind’s blindness, trying to find new views to move me (who lie listless
In this room and will till the will within lifts me) from some somnolence that flits
Betwixt vision and dream; still, even as I think I’m on the brink of something deep,
As soon as I blink a hundred woolly sheep will come to shepherd me to sleep,
My tired thoughts I tried hard to number herd-gathered behind slumber’s gate.

*

This window frames all that’s near as far away, now making snow showers somehow show
(Who knows how?) as though stars farther off than ours, casing and glass magically casting
My neighbors’ houses as far off as stars from one another in the Milky Way are,
Or as galaxies from galaxies that, for the most part, move farther apart by the hour
(What dark force resists closeness this way none can say, but some will insist it’s Sin).
Each flake I watch fall (slow as Time flows when in a phase of waiting- or fast, as in a squall,
In some shape of eight) is the mere weight of a cell in my brain, are all air when compared
To the very shadow of a feather, though cell and flake together are greater than every grain
Of sand on the world’s strands, while the three gathered- white flake, gray cell, brown
Grain- are fewer by far than those blown stars whose Heaven-sent elements we are…
(How can my so-blown-mind not raise up praise to my divine Master who fashioned me of a star?
Unless because an uttering-nothing-tongue, one stunned beyond stuttering, is useless to express
The praise that’s on it: praise that anyway flutters this not-dumb heart that prays in its chambers;
May no atheist-ungratefulness silence my Soul since that would be foulness too great for words).

*

Far too many, standing stranded, understand man and man set as separate as star and star
We see apart, yet that are a part of an art altogether far too large for any not an angel to frame;
To some gazers each star seems a stranger to its neighbors (same as we in lack of care, anger
Or fear are to ours next door), strays arranged at angles all too tangled to glean the dimmest
Gleam or glimmer of a meaning from (each star I can’t read is a meteor to me, or more remote
Than some mote blinking at the inky brink, a glint of a hint, a thing too thin for all this thinking on),
A thousand points set in a scene correctly and best seen by every eye seeking connection.

*

Stars to some are sparks set against starkest-staring darkness, while some again seem to see them
(Whose spherical music is to eye as well as ear really as mellifluous as harps) as sharp as shrapnel,
Shard-hard, as spears, spikes, icicles from a shattered, scattered Particle; balls of gas, yes, yet also
Last least bits of crystal or glass that have traveled infinite distances as they that slip from our grips,
Split, spit out by a Force stronger, stranger, more foreign than any Four-in-One through some room
Without roof, floor or walls (neither four nor one), rush-of-lightspeed-fast out past sweep of brush,
Broom or suck of vacuum… or spilt like milkiest white while we weep we know not why (no more
Know than the willow will though not now low, or poor Margaret why her regret over Goldengrove),
With no magic magnetic net or ten billion to pull them, or us, all together again: others, ghost-lost,
Consumed in vast vacuums, vats of blackness, fragile as snowflake, icicle or crystal, cry at last
For the mere atoms they are, reflecting-in-error in their light-as-light-or-air, agile-as-angel flights…
(Then are astronomers no more than stars’ atoms? Whoever says so is a blind snorer, no more).

*

Some see these small-as-salt stars through salty-as-seas tears, stare through the teary veil
Of a sharp-to-tearing, heart-scarring grief, scared beyond starting at their own desert places
(Where no trace of a human race is) staring back at them, staring out at barren snow and stars
From behind windows barred and barbed, prisoners lost and solitary as airy hosts of ghosts are…
Witnesses at-a-distance we are of our coming from there to form here, as at-random and against
Odds astonishing if not astronomical; often I contemplate late at night constellations telling tales
By stellar tessellation, try to divine my divine lines in and by the same, some symmetry to my starry
Mystery, one shining in me I name mine but is my same-as-me neighbors’ also- a universal story
(All the while with an inkling the winter stars twinkling white are winking in at me from inky night).

*

So our brightest lights are tacked to blackest tapestries backed by thought-turned-back-on-itself;
I’ve not, from a child of five or ten, gotten past asking what’s past the outermost bounds of Space…
Still, till I die, I’m bound to ask- and will never find a solution since sense-fed thought is one short
To see beyond four forms- whether it’s more thisness to endlessness, else less to absolute absence
To which Sense reasons, either/neither, while wide-eyed Innocence admits, with God all is possible
(Every I now saying I’m existing begins even against odds impossible, is ever-being, never exiting),
And while all light dies, a childlike, blind delight will shine like a star in sight of its Almighty Maker…

*

Through some dozen panes- three-by-four- I witness, with twigs, sprigs and limbs
Switching with four seasons (views as of wives, winking, winning ladies in wigs of pink,
Of every whiteness I via eye can think of- virgin, ivory, bone, dove and all the like I love-
Who lose them in the heat I hate, greeting me in green till, in wind and mind, I’m shed,
Myself a shell that fell, helpless at their feet), sights enough to sift, sigh, be sad at-
If I haven’t, that is, insight enough to tell signs from desires; so tears will stream
At shed leaves as loves of mine leave me pining for at least one thing that’s evergreen.

*

I witness, as if in single-file, life and lives lived amid five lines dividing outside and in, rain
And wind at bay, while pain, otherwise a pin, thorn or of northeaster force or the other sorts,
Is kept from sinking in deeper than inks on skin, shrinking in force or form from not thinking on,
Or on no more than to deny or ignore; a pin’s pains may double like deep-throated, double-lung-
Flung words in a tunnel; or, worse, grow as a slut’s lusts, a whore who swore with forked tongue
To love just one but quickly cut, with double-edged sword, his sore heart out (may multiply
And spiral as April’s rains, Eros or flowers that in May reign, or my dismay when they wither
In the weather of June and July); but why, I wonder, suffer far-off-tomorrow’s storms today,
Bear crosses up ridges or cross needless bridges, unless we’re wretches seeking wretchedness
For its own sake, mistaking taking needles in time as wisdom where no tears are in what we wear.

*

This window, when it spins and bellows a first month’s tornado, blows at
Or even well below zero- frozen to a degree as stone- and bone-cold as a Soul
No longer cloud-soft from oft losing heat of heart, hard from some too long
Erosion of hopes, moss-soft, fertile life to what I take for granite, soil to a clod-
Closes me off from colossal loss at a loss still worse (shut-up as dust-powdered women-
Moths, not mothers- such ones no black-habited, cross-clad nuns- snow-bright brides
Of God, but white-gowned widows crossly conserving their cold to self-consuming).

*

Snug in some womb or bud, but buried, too, in the tomb (not now bottomless,
Thank God above) of my own choosing, of lowness above love, the time
Must come soon when, unless I’m hardly less blessed than that holy water
From the stoup, I’m chilled unto a stupor, until numb and blue, stunned
And sunken under pillows of snow, shrunken in touch, blunted to the blood,
Below the blowing but not knowing I’m frozen from so long being so: then I’ll be
Soft only in brain, in heart hard as skull, cold to every bone till thought is thawed…
So low at this flying solo, I still go on floating, though not so high aloft now as when
Wind-driven or drifting over river or ocean, but only lonely as a shower-shed cloud,
Swollen as a spring flood once but long since blown to shreds and shrouds;
So sorrows, too soon sown, are monsoons borrowed to form tomorrow’s Sahara.

*

I’m one (me, an I, I mean) who wonders if he, unique as any flake yet the same
Make as the many, only one while equally all, could be other than the one I am
By being among those so many others; alter quantity and sooner or later alter
The quality also (not quite like ice, snow, water, but so often I cycle back to an icicle
Just as soon as I soften a single degree it seems), change the entity entirely,
Fine or fade each feature of face, change phases, the future frame and shape…
For from forms firm flow forth froth and foam, go from once-thick-within to film-thin
Through and throughout, thoughts shifting with the wind, each weather-weary
Heart with the firmament over four seasons, and with winter, first and last,
Ever the worst for who miss spring’s mists and must feel most the frost that is
(Each Soul a soil a little drizzle and chill will visit, while some live at latitudes
Where only snow falls and grows white rose-tall in rows)… I’ve so lost my ground
As I live and go on all alone along this line of life I don’t now know if I’d ever found it
From the get-go: and, too long in the snow, am as one who no longer knows
White mounds upon the ground from clouds, and so all falls out upside-down…

*

I don’t know how to go forth by shadows, nor if, by moss-growth, North truly shows,
But (a needful rule to follow) when lost in some far-off and foreign-to-you forest
Of frost like needles or thorns to your Soul, first stop for rest lest, in short order,
You end up circling the more you go, forward toward where you were not long before,
And so on soon worse off by miles than you were (when you knew where you weren’t).
When seized on by that double-dyeing season, twin winter, both the first and fourth
Of our year, early and late, head and tail, and all seems so cold, all up slope and hill
Between the Soul’s sole poles (not North nor South now but Life and Death), then cease
Digging when in that hollow hole, keep still, chill and go burrow under some hill.

*

I know how overnight those billows, the heavy, heaven-sent accumulation
Of hours both fast and slow, by the drowsy town’s thunder-loud plows
Will be shoved from the road to form moth-white mounds at the mouth
Of my house where I’m never at home; worry how I, all alone, will have to shovel out
My hovel if I hope to escape from this snow-globe world (so homebound am I now,
In both body and thought, I half-suppose I, with all four lobes, must be enclosed
Under some such dome- me, a nemo to everyone I know, no less snowed-in than some
Midwinter-Nome- and three which domes still sit on the sill since two Christmases ago,
And in this mix I glimpse shells held within shells, behold worlds-within-worlds) and so
Return tomorrow to my own mole-ish role in the now-without-me-wider, whiter world,
And so I’ll roll on, a snowball-into-a-boulder, one none but a god could shoulder…

*

To smother and smooth down the sound growing in or round me each moment
I plow my head below-pillow; second sense is soon ensconced in silence,
Ear as conscious of outer sound (yet not yet sinner-deaf to Conscience,
That inborn, loud-as-our-Lord’s-Words inner shout, our life’s bright light)
As eye is of sight (who hears seas in conches knows), while silenced are sighs,
However slight, in the heart, and groans buried, however great, in the throat.
I await the melting to come with the season rather than seize with manly hand
On the work to be done toward that end, blending the wish with the wind
As imperceptibly as white bleeding white, while will will dwindle with wish
Like limbs that never lift or swing get limp, wings that never flit forget the rhythm
Of the winds, me freezing and refreezing, yet never melting beyond any degree
(Should I shed tears I fear the salt wouldn’t melt a hard heart that hasn’t felt).
In here it’s bitterer than any winter out there where the three others seem to be,
By comparison, now in season, ones still as really equally far off as I from me.

*

For now, though, I choose to doze and hope overnight no new frozenness blows in,
Self wound round my wound like a serpent sits in its coils, restless to shed this shelter,
This shell so long dwelt in that to lose would be along with self, as the ding-dong with bells,
The song with the tongue and the longing (that some lonely only will love) with fulfillment.
I look now and see how two hands have gone twice round the clock, those snow-drowsy,
Homebound hours slowing in the now (on the one hand) when I’m low, though somehow
Passing fast (on the other) in my looking back; over a foot of snow now cloaks the ground
And I’ll doze another dozen hours, or even double that, and only hope I won’t wake to two.

*

Holed up, I’ll hold on like a bulb, Soul enfolded until thoughts softer than snow
Flow slowly lower into the soil with the thaw; holding still till the golden crocuses
And daffodils in showers unfold; trying now to recall if the groundhog saw its shadow
(How shallow show all our hopes grounded on shadows) when it stole from its hole
A dozen days ago, though I forget whether it did, and then even which means which.

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