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 Kenneth Rexroth 3 AM, the night is absolutely still; Snow squeals beneath my skis, plumes on the turns. I stop at the canyon’s edge, stand looking out Over the Great Valley, over the millions — In bed, drunk, loving, tending mills, furnaces, Alone, wakeful, as the world rolls in chaos. The quarter moon rises in the black heavens — Over the sharp constellations of the cities The cold lies, crystalline and silent, Locked between the mountains. Please note: art by Nancy Boudreaux @ Offerings.  blog.nboudreaux.com

by Tom Hennen Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods, night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering, along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes, but the power that moves through the world and makes our hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself. please note: artwork by Robert Bateman

"But by evening the comfortable gloom of December had returned. Nearly all the snow in the treetops had slipped away, and with it the illusion that daylight had somehow been trapped in the canopy above. The woods had reerected themselves. Sunset came and went, and all the color in the natural landscape drained away with it. Blue Christmas bulbs strung along the gables of an old farmhouse, or the orange glow of an incandescent lamp seen through a roadside window at twilight, made it plain how utterly the world had been reduced to black and white. The cold came on a little deeper that night, and in the morning the snow on the woodpile was spiked with frost." from The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Fairbanks Under the Solstice by  John Haines Slowly, without sun, the day sinks toward the close of December. It is minus sixty degrees. Over the sleeping houses a dense fog rises—smoke from banked fires, and the snowy breath of an abyss through which the cold town is perceptibly falling. As if Death were a voice made visible, with the power of illumination... Now, in the white shadow of those streets, ghostly newsboys make their rounds, delivering to the homes of those who have died of the frost word of the resurrection of Silence. Honey-Haired Girl has moved to Alaska. The Land of the Midnight Sun. The Last Frontier. Hubby was up there for about two weeks to get her settled. I was just up there for Thanksgiving. She's doing well; thank you for asking. I believe the lowest temperatures were hovering at -18, and the sun is up for about 5 hrs. And, by "up," I mean it drifts along the horizon. It's dark by 4 pm. The roads are essentiall...

Every year when we watch the Oscar ceremonies we see the nominations for the short films and documentaries and say out loud, "WTH??  Who gets to see these films?" And then, the next day or even by the end of the program we've forgotten the whole matter. This year after a particularly cabin-fever inducing snow fall we booted our way up to the village to check out civilization and noticed a flyer on Sitwell's Coffee Shop window with a date and a theater location to watch the Oscar Shorts. Serendipity!! The Cincinnati World Cinema has been doing it for the last 14 years and we're nothing but clueless morons to have missed it all these years. I think you can also buy it on Amazon for instant viewing on your device. But again, techno idjits are we with the attention span of a moth. So short films work well with our distracted brains. The longest film was 39 minutes I believe. The shortest, 3 minutes, give or take a minute or so. Seven films the first day, or t...

by Dara Wier                              I had been continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results. On most days the children learned how to do something. Time passed around us as something approaching a figure eight might move in order to let all else move or be moved by our large numbers of feelings exponentially on high alert once we let them register. It passed us around. It passed around us like a river around a boulder. Music consisted of light & light came on time. It was impossible for us not to anthropomorphize everything. And yes, watching ice skaters, the kind called figure skaters, the ones who aren't doing anything other than tracking again & again some figure of infinity marked out on ice for them, this never failed to quiet us down & take us some plac...

A Short Panegyric by Mark Strand                                    Now that the vegetarian nightmare is over and we are back to our diet of meat and deep in the sway of our dark and beauty- ful habits and able to speak with calm of having survived, let the breeze of the future touch and retouch our large and hun- gering bodies. Let us march to market to embrace the butcher and put the year of the carrot, the month of the onion behind us, let us worship the roast or the stew that takes its place once again at the sacred center of the dining room table. (Olivier's on Decatur Street, New Orleans. And, yes, I'm still thinking about their Creole Rabbit.)

Ice by Gail Mazur In the warming house, children lace their skates, bending, choked over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy it's hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river. December's always the same at Ware's Cove, the first sheer ice, black, then white and deep until the city sends trucks of men with wooden barriers to put up the boys' hockey rink. An hour of skating after school, of trying wobbly figure-8's, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling, then—twilight, the warming house steamy with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep playing, slamming the round black puck until it's dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father. Although there isn't music, they glide arm in arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers....

by Ted Kooser this Valentine's Day, I intend to stand for as long as I can on a kitchen stool and hold back the hands of the clock, so that wherever you are, you may walk even more lightly in your loveliness; so that the weak, mid-February sun (whose chill I will feel from the face of the clock) cannot in any way lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind (whose subtle insistence I will feel in the minute hand) cannot tighten the corners of your smile. People drearily walking the winter streets will long remember this day: how they glanced up to see you there in a storefront window, glorious, strolling along on the outside of time.

"The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time." --William Shakespeare, MidSummer's Night's Dream Woke up before dawn to drink coffee and work on school stuff. This week the effects of Methylene Chloride (try to avoid) and Baker's Asthma from flour dust(who knew??) Next on the list, fighting with my computer to attach documents required by the IRB site in order to modify a firefighter study protocol. The computer technology is what gives me the biggest blues. I like my attachments to have color coded paper clips and to fit in my grubby little hands. During the last two days of work at Big Fat Teaching Hospital I saw the usual share of hope and futility. We got a transfer from a smaller community hospital across the way; a large stroke treated successfully with TPA, the "clot buster." This gentleman has no deficits from the stroke and hopefully will not have a subsequent bleeding injury. Nice man who starts each...

Happiness Paisley Rekdal I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth. Does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and the dead both snap off in my hands? The neighbor with his stuttering fingers, the neighbor with his broken love: each comes up my drive to receive his pitying, accustomed consolations, watches me work in silence a while, rises in anger, walks back. Does it offend them to watch me not mourning with them but working fitfully, fruitlessly, working the way the bees work, which is to say by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure? I can stand for hours among the sweet narcissus, silent as a point of bone. I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer than your grief. It is such a small thing to be proud of, this garden. Today there were scrub jays, quail, a woodpeck...

It's dark when I leave for work in the morning. It's dark when I drive home, and when I get to glance out the windows it's nothing but grey. I can't sleep all the way through the night. I wake up and think about everything I have to get done. Two studies involving firefighters, flour dust and baker's asthma, and job hazard analysis. And, I'm intimidated by our scanner. Maybe a little a cup of Sleepytime Tea will do the trick tonight and I can sleep past three... An Early Start in Midwinter by Robyn Sarah The freeze is on. At six a scattering of sickly lights shine pale in kitchen windows. Thermostats are adjusted. Furnaces blast on with a whoosh. And day rumbles up out of cellars to the tune of bacon spitting in a greasy pan. Scrape your nail along the window-pane, shave off a curl of frost. Or press your thumb against the film of white to melt an eye onto the fire escape. All night pipes ticked and grumbled like sore bones. The tap runs rust over your chapped h...

by Robyn Sarah I grow to like the bare trees and the snow, the bones and fur of winter. Even the greyness of the nunneries, they are so grey, walled all around with grey stones — and the snow piled up on ledges of wall and sill, those grey planes for holding snow: this is how it will be, months now, all so still, sunk in itself, only the cold alive, vibrant, like a wire — and all the busy chimneys — their ghost-breath, a rumour of lives warmed within, rising, rising, and blowing away. please note: photo art by Patti Hinton

by Jonathan Greene After sledding in the park's deep snow, the two sons refuse to walk home. The weary father trudges along pulling them home in the sparsely trafficked streets snow still falling. At times the kids fall off, laughing, not wanting the day to end. ~ Hushed streets except for the rumble of the subway. Out of the corner of his eye the father spies Orpheus with guitar case, descending the dark steps, off to reclaim lost love.

Saturday mornings used to include a writing workshop class at 9am. Eventually I decided to stop going due to my slowness of creative outbursts. I'm more of a poetry writing gal--I like to get down to the gist of it without all the extraneous wordage. Though truthfully, that could actually be just sheer laziness on my part. I couldn't nag my muse to create a new poem every week and I may or may not have found that exquisite and one perfect word for which I was desperately searching the past seven days between classes. In my mind that makes for a slow and unusual punishment for the rest of the group. There was one woman, though, who, no matter what I wrote would tell me, "You have too many words in this poem." Always reminded me of Amadeus . Always. Every. Single. Time. Now that I'm back in school my right brain is in a continual spasm. Creative writing seems like an eon ago. However, I have the pleasure of introducing you to two of my friends from writing workshop...

We, through a serendipitous stroll in our neighborhood yesterday night, found ourselves in front of a restaurant we'd not been able to try. La Poste. It was late. We'd just left a bar with a good sounding band, but loud, and we'd started walking towards home listening to the revelries on the street and watching the young girls walking in their sky high heels. La Poste was having quite a posh five course meal tasting and we happened to stop in at the right time after all their reservations had been seated and we could pick off the night's menu. The food was amazing. Hubby had duck breast and I had mushroom ravioli, but those words don't do justice to the food. And so, by luck and happenstance we found ourselves in the midst of friendly faces and kind souls with a glass of champagne and chocolate mousse at midnight. It was a good night. After Our Wedding by Yehoshua Nobember When you forgot the address of our hotel in your suitcase, the driver had to pull over...

Going into the fix-'em-up brain factory this morning, hoping the census is low and a few of us can go home early. Or not... Whatever the day brings, I plan to have a glass of bubbly in hand at midnight yelling out a welcome to the new year and a fare-thee-well to the old one. Wishing you and yours much joy and happiness in 2011. Resolutions?...I may have to fine tune a bit, but the sentiment above seems okay with me!

by Timothy Steele Although the roof is just a story high, It dizzies me a little to look down. I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights And cast it to the weeping birch's crown; A dowel into which I've screwed a hook Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs Will accent the tree's elegant design. Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause And call up commendations or critiques. I make adjustments. Though a potpourri Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs, We all are conscious of the time of year; We all enjoy its colorful displays And keep some festival that mitigates The dwindling warmth and compass of the days. Some say that L.A. doesn't suit the Yule, But UPS vans now like magi make Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves Are gaily resurrected in their wake; The desert lifts a full moon from the east And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze, And valets at chic restaurants will soon Be tending flock...