If you’ve nowhere else to go, look outside and watch the snow

Once you get your mind wrapped around this poetry thing (see yesterday’s morning and post-midnight blog), it’s hard to move away from the topic. Today, looking outside, I thought about the different ways to blog about what we in Madison are seeing. I went so far as to write a header for this post, just to show how bad a blog entry could be.

But if you want cadenzas that are more palatable, there are options. For instance, you can usually find something in the (Pulitzer Prize winning) poems of Mary Oliver that’ll give you an appreciation for natural beauty. Sure enough, the following lines are worth printing out. I think knowing that she was about 65 when she wrote it makes this even more "joyously unrestrained":

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

(permission from author to cite this was not available at the moment since she is preoccupied with feeding the homeless in Bethesda, but to avoid infringement on copyright, I want to link to a site available to the public which will bring up the same poem)