Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
I'm imagining many of you across the country will wake up to a morning like this--snow!--from all the weather reports I've seen. Snow, and lots of it. I couldn't help but repost this couplet from the Richard Wilbur poem included at the end of yesterday's entry. But close that window! Even here in California, it's too cold for that.
The solstice presses upon us and we gather our traditions close to prepare for the darkest night of the year...Cards have begun to arrive in earnest, invitations extended or hoped for. The morning air is all awash with angels.
I'm typing in the dark. I'm always a day behind (and a dollar short, sadly) on the west coast. If I tried to compose and post the same day, you'd never see this until evening on the east coast. So I sit with laptop and down comforter and think of the distances. The computerized bell on the Presbyterian church strikes six...
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are
I can't believe that the commentator on the News Hour just called the health care overhaul and debate, "sausage making." No kidding. Is there a sausage zeitgeist after all? Do the angels know my name?
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
In my beginning poetry class, I won't let students write poems using angels. No angels, no butterflies, and no "love." Perhaps that's why I'm so smitten by Wilbur's poem. He leaves butterflies out.
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their ominpresence
"The snow fell at the rate of an inch an hour. Whiteout. Flights cancelled." And yet, my youngest son arrived at JFK after a year abroad this evening at 8pm. My friends, Lisabeth and Colin, en route from San Diego to a new home in Massachusetts driving their packed car and dog, get stuck in first Albuquerque, then Amarillo, waiting out the storm.
and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
I don't know about angels. If they are like snow, okay. Otherwise I'd rather not see any. In the Bible they are terrifying. They are not like what my beginning workshop students want to say they are.
"Oh, let there by nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."
That more or less sums it up for me. But, when it first falls, after the first few hours, before the plows, the first footprints, the car accidents, the lost power, before the elderly woman bundles up, goes out to her snow-filled walkway and wields the shovel of her late husband--then, the way the world seems to wait in its stillness of snow, for those minutes, I think I see.
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone
So a real man? Sorry, save it for Friday. Neither angels nor snow may be stopped. But my husband did bring home pho' for dinner.
(written last night)
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