the nothing that is

We'll be skipping time in the swing this morning, as you can tell. The latest recorded snowfall on record for the Denver area is June 12, but snow after Mother's Day is pretty rare, so this may well be the last snowfall of the season. We'll be back up in the 70s by the weekend.

So we set out on a brisk walk, the second half made brisker by the realization that it was starting to rain, and other than our footfalls and the lightest sound of the near mist, I was listening to the strains of poetry bubbling up from my memory. Hope you enjoy.

Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
(Robert Frost)

In a while, I will put on some boots

and step out like someone walking in water,

and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,

and I will shake a laden branch

sending a cold shower down on us both.
(Collins)

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A traveling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.
(Emily Dickinson)

Whenever I look
out at the snowy
mountains at this hour
and speak directly
into the ear of the sky,
it's you I'm thinking of.

(Twichell)

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.
(Williams)

Even as our cloudy fancies take

Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels
(Longfellow)

And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
(Emerson)

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
(Robert Frost)

Truth is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways where a window's lampglow
has added something. The rest
is dark and light together tolled
against the boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.
(Adcock)


For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
(Stevens)