Lovely, isn't it?

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-Wallace Stevens (1923)

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

William Carlos Williams (1934)

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2

We laughed at the hollyhocks together

and then I sprayed them with lye.

Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.

The man who asked for it was shabby

and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.

Forgive me. I was clumsy, and

I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Kenneth Koch (1962)

To maintain viable respiratory function — or not to maintain viable respiratory function — that is the problem-solution. Whether ‘tis more self-enabling to encounter multi-deprivational factors out with a support-based context, or to identify and resolve areas of conflict through an active posture of goal-oriented intervention? To experience terminal dysfunction, to enter a soporific frame of reference — no more, and by a somnolent role-set, to say we end the cardiac stress-symptoms and other anti-stabilising mechanisms of the ongoing biological process. ‘Tis the ultimate respirational function of the Department of Heath and Social Security. To experience terminal dysfunction, to enter a soporific frame of reference; to enter a soporific frame of reference, perchance to display substantive rapid-eye-movement brain scan patterning. Aye, there’s the locus of dynamic friction; for in that post-burial situation, when our case-histories have been finally de-activated, what residual neurological motor-activity may occur, must give us pause. 

-Tom Leonard