Snow. a creative essay.

Snow. You either love it, or you hate it. One of Wallace Stevens most famous poems, “The Snow Man” is taking this element of nature, and creating a way of looking at ourselves:

One must have a mind of winter 

even Emily Dickinson said, If it makes me cold to the bone, then I know it's poetry.

Consider Frank O'Hara, always on the go, right up to the minute:

It is snowing!

Or William Carlos Williams, calling it a painted scene:

beyond
the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen
a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture 

Robert Frost felt almost guilty to be caught in the glory of the woods:

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

When they don't know what to call it, they call it snow on the television, the wrong station, something not coming in, where the spirits lied in Poltergist. I've seen it and heard this static popping on the telephone, and I mean to tell you, that's the hottest kind of snow ever when layers and inches build up with ease you cannot find for yourself.

My grandmother hung styrofoam snowflakes from the ceiling, huge, no two alike, the care and precision she took when every holiday was straight off Rockwell. I would get a Christmas sweater sprakling with sequins and snowflakes. I don't recall ever being cold, but walking home from church on Christmas Eve, my mother telling me her steel rod was cold. I don't recall anyone in my family reading, or liking or writing poetry. I guess we didn't have to.