Tag Archives: winter

The birds gave autumn up

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The birds gave autumn up for dead
But made a song before they fled
Here are the words they sang and said:

Oh, no, it’s the end of the world!
Oh, no, it’s the end of the world!
Oh, no, it’s the end of the world!
Let’s scatter the nests and fly away!

The frogs have sunk and turned to stone
The seeds are sleeping, each alone,
The rest of the world may do as it pleases
When we are gone, gone, gone, gone.

But Spring hatched from December’s nut;
The grass turned green and the ram sprang up;
The birds returned from where they’d flown
Acting as if they’d always known;
The frogs from their stony sleep uncurled
And the birds made song for the beginning of the world.

 

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The Geology of Slush

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SONY DSCThe dirty snow
As it retreats
Leaves small moraines
Upon the streets;

But melt that flows
Into the drains
Deposits eskers
Not moraines.

A moraine (as the Encyclopædia Britannica reliably informs) is an accumulation of rock debris that has been carried or shoved, then dropped or abandoned, by a glacier. A moraine is a jumble, for all it may deposited more or less neatly:

Glacier National Park, Montana. Terminal moraine at the foot ...

An esker (says, again, Encyclopædia Britannica) is a ridge deposited by a subglacial or englacial meltwater stream, with the deposited material generally sorted by grain size–the sort of attention to detail one would expect from flowing water. “Eskers may range from 16 to 160 feet (5 to 50 m) in height, from 160 to 1,600 feet (500 m) in width, and [from] a few hundred feet to tens of miles in length.” So:

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A tip of the hat to James Harbeck at Sesquiotica, for his learned discourse upon the history and flavor of the word esker.

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In Cold Comfort

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8507444415_5681bcb8bc_oThere isn’t much left for me to do
During this dead of winter
While the snow covers me up
Like language, like bitter
Hexameters, like a cold poem.
Like a long letter from home.

Like the fall of words
That piled up years long
That thawed and froze and thawed and froze
That one fine day were dislodged by a mere nothing
That avalanched all at a go
And strewed our bodies to the far reaches
Of the meadow, from which they
Couldn’t ever be recovered
When it turned out spring
Didn’t come.

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