A Tidings of Magpies

"Some people love waking to the sight of new snow. Fallen snow is fine, but I like the sight of it falling, fine as dust or so fat you can hear it land against the kitchen window. I like the tunnel of dry snow you drive through at night, the headlights blanking out a few yards ahead, and the feeling that you're driving into some abysmal vacuum. I like the ground-blizzards and the snow that slithers down the road ahead of you. What I like is the visual impairment snow brings with it, the way it obscures some things and defines others, like the wind."                                                        - ---Verlyn Klinkenborg from The Rural Life

by Eamon Grennan In little dark-ringed frames of light the neighborhood is dining: heads nod to one another; candlelight catches on things---- threads of it snapped by knives and forks, the glass of water, the wine. No one is not at home here except the man walking the block alone and peering in as if he were a visitor from beyond and wanted to feast his eyes again  on this picture of felicity, trying to read the lips unrestrained and quick in talk, faces where light plays like a dog in water----haloes of hair, hands flying.

Snowy Night by Mary Oliver Last night, an owl in the blue dark tossed an indeterminate number of carefully shaped sounds into the world, in which, a quarter of a mile away, I happened to be standing. I couldn’t tell which one it was – the barred or the great-horned ship of the air – it was that distant. But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter? Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness. I suppose if this were someone else’s story they would have insisted on knowing whatever is knowable – would have hurried over the fields to name it – the owl, I mean. But it’s mine, this poem of the night, and I just stood there, listening and holding out my hands to the soft glitter falling through the air. I love this world, but not for its answers. And I wish good luck to the owl, whatever its name – and I wi...