We've had a week of snow. We've had snow days and late starts and cars stuck in drifts. I've been thinking a lot of Wallace Stevens' remarkable and frigid poem, "The Snowman":
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I was, in fact, thinking of the line "full of the same wind/that is blowing in the same bare place" while shoveling the front walkway this morning. There was a mild wind, and snow was falling (again), and there was no sound at all.
Until the FEDEX GUY DROVE UP, and brought with him my new beehive. What is it to have a mind of Spring, in the midst of these drifts?
Time to build the hive!
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