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Dec 22 2019

The sound of snow falling.

With such a soft muffled touch

you might have just imagined it,

snow landing on snow

feathering gently down.

Because all you hear is absence

when snow blankets the world

deep and undisturbed;

dead air, between the crystals

balanced on their points,

absorbing sound

like thick cotton wool.

But you're sure you heard it once,

in that remote mountain pass

when the wind had died

and you stood perfectly still

taking slow shallow breaths.

Late at night

when the air was heavy

and sound carries best.

So far

from the machinery of human life

you felt like the last of your kind.

Fat wet flakes, near freezing

that seem to fill the sky,

pouring down

and piling up as you watch.

That you fear might bury you

in a solitude of winter

that lasts year after year.

How silent, under the snow.

I wonder if it's like hovering

in the ocean's dark depths,

your neutral body weightless

the sun blotted out.

Where you can only tell down from up

by watching your bubbles rise,

precious air

a life-line to the surface.

A small opening

in front of your face

from warm exhaled breath.

The thump-thump of your heart

the rush of blood in your head.

In a piece in this weekend's Opinion section, there was an email exchange between two people about endangered winter; endangered, that is, by climate change. 2 men (Giles Whittell and Bund Brunner) who love winter.

At one point, Brunner says this: I remember times when I heard snow falling high in the Bavarian Alps when I was cross-country skiing there and there was no wind, no cars or other sound to distract attention. A very gentle sound, like crystals landing. Heavy snowflakes, just around the freezing point. I know physicists are skeptical. They think the pitch is too high to be perceived by a human ear – unlike by the ear of a bat or fish. Maybe I have extrasensory abilities? In any case, I like the idea.

“The sound of falling snow” got stuck in my head, and I thought it might make a good start to a poem. This is the result.

It's uncanny, though, how poems write themselves. Here's a short email I sent, along with an earlier version of this poem, to one of my first readers. It briefly explains my own surprise at what I'd written:

Yes, the rewrite is very different. Amazing what weaknesses are revealed by bringing fresh ears to a piece. On rereading, I notice things I never had in mind. This was really intended to be just a descriptive poem, a mood piece. But it's interesting to note all the morbid undertones:  the dead air, the wind dying, the burying alive, the sun blotted out; all the references to air and breath and vital organs. And, of course, the last of your kind. Combine that with the ambience of peace, solitude, and quiet the poem conveys, and it really starts to read like a rehearsal of death!