Winter like a crushing hand, like a fist, like a weight on my shoulders, on the house, the hills, the sky. Winter unending. Storms bred from a nest in the hills. You could see them swirling out and screaming down from the northeast and it was so cold the snow …
The January thaw, that’s what the old ones called it. Winter lets go for a span of days and rain comes, melting much of the snow away. The forest opens up a bit. I walk through the trees, the ground is crushed down from where the snow was. There is …
Winter clutches the land. It had been so cold that snow was like sand, squeaking under boots, drifting on roads, light as dust. Then the weather changed. Rain came and howling wind, the rain froze when it hit the roads, highways are closed, littered with spun-out ambulances and snowplows. The …
It’s cold. The old house bumps and snaps all night, contracting and settling like a restless sleeper. Outside the moon casts the night in a kind of black shadowed parody of day. It’s quiet. Along the brook trees crack like gunshots. The sap expands as it freezes and splits the …
The last time I went looking for dragons and wrote of it here, it was early spring. There was a sense of decayed things emerging, then being overgrown, sublimated into green watercress. This time it’s winter, things are buried. The snow has come. It came late this year, the time …
“Turning tides, their regularities! What is the heart, that it ever was afraid, Knowing as it must know spring’s release, Shining heart, heart constant as the tide?” – Seamus Heany [from the dutch of J.C. Bloem (1887-1966)] High wind cut cold North Atlantic water in tattered edged …
Snowshoe to work. Snow like frozen waves across the field. Buds frost spiked. Brush wolf tracks across watering hole. Startling green watercress. Patterns emerge amid lengthening days. More storms blow through, the world is blue tinged inside where windows are blocked by snowdrifts. The wind whistles high through a crack …
Snow falls on snow, then more snow falls. Somewhere in the forested hills the bear sow and her cubs hibernate and the moose shifts about in his winter yard. It is snowshoe weather, too deep for skis. I spent the day yesterday shoveling the snow from the roof of my …