I. Winter solstice. * first winter moonlight / glistens the hoar-frosted slates / of the church steeple.   * celebrating / happy and merry / solstice day. These two poems are from Dion O’Donnol’s (Long Beach, CA) calendar books of 1998, day by day: a haiku year, and his 2000, day breaks: a haiku year respectively. These books, plus another one from 2002, are part of my mornings’ readings.
        The other four – a flip calendar by Dorothy McLaughlin (Somerset, NJ)  and myself, connecting our houses (1997, LovePat Press), and three December monthlies that I put together and paid Kwik Kopy to print, collate and staple, complete the list.
        From the calendar,* icy edges / of gurgling creek / winter solstice.  *a blackbird / on the top-most branch / ~winter solstice.  *winter solstice walk~/ the impressionist landscape / without my glasses.  Here is one I wrote this year: *winter solstice/ the last piece of pear cake left/ from Thanksgiving.  
        Finally, a tanka of Carolyn Thomas (Season) from her book (2003) puddle on the ink stone: *lighting the veranda / a solstice moon – / winter tea / steeps in the pot / my daughter gave me.
  
II. Snow slows things down.
        Winter quiet – teakettle, heater and fridge.  Setting: a wooden rocker in front of the patio door. Staccato mewls from the cat looking out at juncos searching for strewn seeds. The silent drip of snowmelt; flutter of snowbirds; a cardinal – blood red against the gray limb. 
        This is the perfect time to read a small collection of winter poems edited by Barbara Rogasky for Scholastic.
        Snowbound, and reading Whittier’s “Snowbound,” I wonder about the line, And even the long sweep, high aloof, / In its slant splendor, seemed to tell / of Pisa’s leaning miracle.  What is the sweep?  I’ll have to ask my literary friends.         Elizabeth-the-calico stretches high on the glass door, her silent sign to go out.  “No,” I scold, “you’ll scare the birds.”
        Having just read three of Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I look up just in

 time to see three crows pause on snowy limbs, then fly.  How strange…and wonderful.  Their calling added counterpoint to the inside sounds.        In this time and place, we hear none of Poe’s sledge bells merrying up the night.  Just an occasional agonized crunch as a car passes slowly on its way down Martindale Hill toward the university.
        More juncos pick at the seeds. What startles them, since the calico is beside me?
        In “Winter Dark,” Lillian Moore sees lights as commas, periods and exclamation points.  But our streetlight is only a perpetual nightglow, though two reflectors down the pole might be a colon, guiding visitors to our driveway.
        In America’s heartland, the closest, safest substitute for skating Wordsworth’s frozen ponds are ice rinks—some inside all year, others brought in for several weeks near Christmas to lure children and youth whose parents spend hard-earned wages in nearby shops.
        Ah, “Velvet Shoes” evokes times past when my All-Region choir members rehearsed and performed Wylie’s poem set to music—harmonies as exquisite and diaphanous as her words.
        But we cannot walk in this snow without raising our legs from each ankle-deep footprint, and arm balancing ourselves to safety.
        With the thermometer’s rise and a slight northwest breeze, snow showers are frequent – clumps sometimes powdery, sometimes globby – pulled down by gravity, which centers and grounds all things without wings.  Juncos dart across the scene, horizontal against vertical—a Japanese print. 
         Only now do I read Hardy’s “Snow in the Suburbs” about this very phenomenon.  Snow-lumps, he calls them.
        It is too early yet, but patches of old snow, like Frost’s, will hide and last in shady corners, bidding passersby to not forget what they so desperately wished for, and afterwards, just as desperately wished to melt.
        Teasdale’s lines provide a summary for this morning’s reverie:  Look for a lovely thing and you will find it, / It is not far – / It never will be far.