A World of White and Snowy Scents

Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
-Wallace Stevens

Right now, I can’t imagine beyond snow.  It’s been falling all day again, though this time, not to much effect.  Deer tracks run everywhere:  they veer toward the hemlock, then, foiled by the fencing, veer back to open ground.  The paths break into ragged patches where deer scraped through to get at grass.

Juncos huddle below the feeder, looking for seeds dropped by the chickadees.  A lone woodpecker scuttles up a tree trunk.  Back toward the woods, squirrels are regretting their failure to harvest more acorns before the snow began.

Recently, Verlyn Klinkenborg waxed rhapsodic about snow.  I, too, like a snowscape as well as anyone, but some days are formless.  The sun is reduced to a vague blot.  The snow loses its whiteness, like a piece of lace left too long in an attic trunk.

On days like that, I resort to simple things:  I retreat to my armchair in the company of a cat and a book.  The books I choose are sometimes troublesome, though, like The Given and the Made:  Strategies of Poetic Redefinition:  “the task of the artist is not patient digging in the earth, but remaining ready to look up at just the right millisecond.”

The reference, by Helen Vendler, is to a poem by Jorie Graham.  Poems with snow in them, I thought—maybe that will give shape to the day.

There is, of course, “The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens:  “One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow . . .”

And Anne Carson.  She lives in Canada; she knows snow.  “Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair/where I always sit, as it did/on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.//I put it on whenever I come in,/as he did, stamping/the snow from his boots . . .”

Thus fortified, I looked up Jorie Graham and found again a poem I’d wondered at before:  “The Dream of the Unified Field.”

On my way to bringing you the leotard
you forgot to include in your overnight bag,
the snow started coming down harder.
I watched each gathering of leafy flakes
melt round my footfall.
I looked up into it—late afternoon but bright.
. . .

Each poem starts so simply, but, oh, where they go!  The day isn’t formless, not anymore.  These three are not like deer, digging patiently for grass.  No.  They have each “looked up at the only/right time” to find a specific, singular snow.

***
The first quotation is from "The Poems of Our Climate," by Wallace Stevens.
The final quotation is from "History," by Jorie Graham.