FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL DECEMBER 14, 2001

Such a
reflec-

tion
on the

morning
pond.

Still as
ice yet

it's not
ice yet.

It is
sky come

down to
kiss us.

The temperature is about

freezing but we're not frozen yet. It's a sullen morning, like a girl unhappy after a one-night stand, unhappy he was there and unhappy he has gone.

The grass is still green in our lawns. Imagine - this far into December. The flag at the cemetery is wrapped around the pole, only a tail of it flaps fatly. Thousands of seagulls on a field north of Fairwater. Until the field is covered the color of seagulls, the field will be covered with seagulls themselves.

I'm talking about snow. The snow fence waits, patient as rust.

Comments

[poor_mad_peter]

Even the eagles and gulls have left us for open water farther south.

Last week, my daughter spotted what I think (she doesn't) was a Whiskeyjack (Canada Jay) in our back yard. Nothing scares them south...

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Peter. Your Whiskeyjack is perhaps a metaphor for those of us who must have winter. We aren't driven south, at least not for more than a week or ten days of scuba diving in Cozumel in January. Then we return, and we hunker down for some more of it.

[Lori Witzel]

Sweet post: the sliver of poem, and the "patient as rust" (sigh) snow fence.

Thanks for the pre-snow quiet, from those of us for whom the post-snow quiet isn't a likely thing.

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Lori - I hope you're well and warm and have light and heat. We've got fog today, but still plenty of snow. "Patient as rust" - I find myself surprised as I re-read these entries. Sometimes it appears I know how to write. And, sometimes, that I have something to say.... That's refreshing, given how hard it is to shape one good sentence.