Snow, my Thankfulness

I've been guilty lately of mono-media blogging. It doesn't seem like a stretch to believe that you'd like to discover more from this site about our lives here than you can get through my poems. Although I hope you've enjoyed them. This picture was taken from our window this morning. The past five or six days have looked about like this, something that the neighbors tell us is impossibly rare. There have been snowball fights, fallings down on the pavement, and lots of immature staring out the window while my wife was trying to tell me something. But she is from Michigan. I never get to see this kind of thing.

   I've written a few poems about snow falling through the light of street lamps. I've spent a few lazy days reading Lord of the Rings, as is my dork-custom at Christmas. Dani goes to work and comes back and we both smile. In the evenings, we walk the city (brighter than usual in the snow), and at one point wandered into the Princes Street Gardens, where we ice skated--or actually, she skated and I fell down a lot and grumbled about being pigeon-toed, which is not, really, the reason I am so bad at it. We've acquired a niece. I have breakfasted at the Two Thin Laddies, my favorite new coffee shop here in Tollcross, our little nook of Edinburgh. I have poked around the local bookstore. I have been absolutely useless to society. A waste of espresso and Dani's hard-earned money. That might be her big Christmas gift to me. And yet she has crammed the space beneath our little tree with what I'm sure are tasteful and generous gifts. As usual, I am able only to write a poem in response.

Snow shaking through the wash

of a street light. The way

words catch and don't catch

how a woman makes me feel.

The way she dances at the edge

of tongue and eye, because

whatever's moving her

is also moving them.

The snow is borne upwards again,

and goes to sleep finally

on the bald head of the mountain.

Walking in the morning, I see it,

and know how old man is, and yet

how young the earth, time,

and words, so that if I apply even

this well-hewn craft of speech,

attempting to say "her,"

it may as well be mute man

slamming rock on rock, trying

to give birth to thunder.