POEM: The color of snow

Some people complain about how the landscape never changes all winter

perhaps they find it anticlimactic after Fall's finale

but I think these are the same people that gripe about Fall's epilogue of beige after the harvest is out and the leaves have been raked

they're the same people who fail to recognize how many different greens there are in the depths of summer,

or how much they change from May to September

But my friend Monet has taught me to see and to savor the colors of snow

he showed me the blues and turquoise, the creams, golds, ambers, lavender and rose

No two months in winter, no two weeks, days or even hours are the same, the rainbow is constantly, quietly, gradually fading in and out,

like waves of hue on one of those fiber optic lamps,  ebbing and flowing washes of light

Some days you feel like you're indoors because there is no line on the horizon, the white of the ground, identical to the sky.

Other days the blue of the sky is is tight and sharp and crisp and refreshing

simultaneously it is never more contrasted to the ground and yet how could so much of such pure, clean blue not be reflected in the snow

In the city it goes from off-white to grays and sooty indigos, leaving some gutters iridescent

By March, plenty of snow in the country will be full of browns and ochers and ash with mud and soup

Some of the most magical mornings are when the freezing fog have left a flocking on the trees

Spruces and pines look like they've been sprayed with paint for sale on the Christmas tree lot

While the branches of elms and oaks seem to have fancy white feathers

I like it when it's not just a visual experience, but an auditory one too

Big FAT flakes visiting the Earth like manna, not falling, but gracing us with their advent,

muffling all sound, silencing the cacophony of everyday life.

What I really like is when it's the frigid cold that silences everything,

but the crunch and the squeak of my feet walking on dry powder compacted into ice.

This Christmas, it came down in heavenly flakes of mica, peeled from the layers of stones in New Jerusalem,

spinning and shimmering as the descend

Amazingly there were drifts and hills of ground diamond powder

it was enough to make you believe in angels and cherubim

and miracles and singing