In the icelight

the only bloom

Hello friends—

It has been dipping into near zero temps over the past week. One benefit of an older house is that at those temps, ice ferns grow silently and abound on windows. I’ve loved their icy magic ever since I first lived in a northern clime and became acquainted with cold winters. And it had me thinking long on how things we are so often told to guard against—the cold, the dark, e.g.—can be sources of unexpected joy when we don’t accept what we’re told.

Alone I look into the eye of ice

It's going nowehere, which is my home.
And always the flat miraculous land breathing ceaseless,
Creaseless, ironed by what hand, smoothed under whose hum?

A wine-eyed sun, an air of laundered poverty,
Consoling by its sense of having been consoled.
Then times ten times ten the trees...endlessly.
Eyesight like bootsteps, icelight like bread, innocent, bold....

(January 16, 1937)
             —Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Christian Wiman

                I'd read about glaciers and I'd seen glaciers. How a stream runs
                       Under their bellies, sluices from their lower reaches...
                          And the taste of it as water, both sweet and sullied
               Or tender as blown glass. Which explains how in poems I confuse
                  Glaciers and glaziers. Which won't explain how I am becoming
                                                      Both ice and glass.
                                                        —David Morley, from Mandelstam Variations

That night I felt the winter in my veins,
A joyous tremor of the icy glow;
And woke to hear the north's wild vibrant strains,
While far and wide, by withered woods and plains,
Fast fell the driving snow. 
                        —Wilfred Campbell

(So I can see you)

come close so I can see you
lucid winter-slipped light:

the only bloom
                 —Pål-Helge Haugen, trans. by Roger Greenwald

Winter Haiku

On the polished surface
of the divine glass,
Chaste with flowers of snow. 
                         —Matsuo Basho

Night in the house by the river

It is late in the year; 
Yin and Yang struggle
In the brief sunlight.
On the desert mountains
Frost and snow
Gleam in the freezing night.
Past midnight,
Drums and bugles ring out, 
Violent, cutting the heart.
Over the Triple Gorge the Milky Way
Pulsates between the stars.
The bitter cries of thousands of households
Can be heard above the noise of battle.
Everywhere the workers sing wild songs.
The great heroes and generals of old time
Are yellow dust forever now.
Such are the affairs of men.
Poetry and letters 
Persist in silence and solitude.
               —Tu Fu, trans. by Kenneth Rexroth

White-Eyes

In winter
    all the singing is in
         the tops of the trees
             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
    shoves and pushes
         among the branches.
             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
    but he's restless—
         he has an idea,
             and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
    as long as he stays awake.
         But his big, round music, after all,
             is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.
    In the pine-crown
         he makes his nest,
             he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
         tucked in a white wing
             while the clouds—

which he has summoned
    from the north—
         which he has taught
             to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
         like stars, or the feathers
               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent—
         that has turned itself
             into snow.
                                    —Mary Oliver

Wishing you all unexpected joy in the new year.