Memories Of Snow (Haiku) Poem by Denis Mair

Size 14 black boots
across a field of new snow...
stomping with relish [1]


Big flakes sifting down...
back home after a long walk
the walls seem to rise [2]


Traceries of white
on every twig in the woods
after last night's snow [3]


The whiteness of snow
set off against dark branches...
like Melville's riddle [4]


Swirl of snow flurries
moving in sheer abandon
as much up as down


The land's white blanket
wearing itself as a jewel...
water comes to us


Shifting dazzlements...
the whys and wherefores of snow,
tied up with my own


Clear sky over snow...
the air is suffused with light
From all directions

..........


Notes:
[1] a memory picture from my teen-age years in Ohio. The four seasons there were quite distinct, compared to where I'm living now.

[2] I really experienced this. Large soft snowflakes were drifting straight downward on a day with no wind. My visual field got used to downward movement, so when I went indoors and gazed at the wall, my eyes seemed to perceive an upward movement. If you stare at an American flag for a few minutes, then look at a white wall, you will see an afterimage (retinal inverse)in green, black and yellow. The upward movement I saw was a similar kind of sensory inverse. (If I'm explaining too much, please forgive me.)

[3] When snow coats one side of each branch in a woods, your eyes prove their capability to perceive a myriad details.

[4] In the novel MOBY DICK, Herman Melville devoted a long chapter to meditating on the color white. He wanted to get to the bottom of "the whiteness of the whale." As for me, my fate-given riddle is blackness-plus-whiteness. Why am I surprised over and over by the same old things...such as elemental purities that come to me through my eyes? The contrast of purities becomes a wide-open symbol, like a vacuum that attracts countless associations and remembered experiences. It seems that beauty helps the thread of associations to play out more freely. What realms of meaning can I reach following that thread? What traction does a symbol give me to climb the slope of knowing-the-world?