Frost on the Sky

The sky in February. Can’t seem to make up its mind.

Clouds racing along, shoved by the sub-zero winds high above us. Is it clearing? Clouding up? Blizzard? Flurry? Even the Weather Channel doesn’t know.

One minute, spring coming.

The next minute, lots of winter left.  Some days the sky is as gray as a wall of cement. Other days, as blue as a June noon.

Ouch. When searching for metaphors, Robert Frost, poet and patron saint of nature observers, said it better. He would have been a wonderful blogger–he went out every day and wrote down his thoughts on mud puddles and stumps and weeds and bushes (and somehow he managed to be interesting in rhyming trochaic tetrameter, too, no mean feat.) Here’s his take on winter skies and winds.

Clear and Colder

Wind, the season-climate mixer,

In my Witches’ Weather Primer

Says, to make this Fall Elixir

First you let the summer simmer,

Using neither spoon nor skimmer

Till about the right consistence.

(This like fate by stars is reckoned,

None remaining in existence

Under magnitude the second.)

Then take some leftover winter

Far to the north of the St. Lawrence.

Leaves to strip and branches splinter,

Bring on wind. Bring rain in torrents—

Colder than the season warrants.

Dash it with some snow for powder.

If this seems like witchcraft rather,

If this seems a witches’ chowder

(All my eye and Cotton Mather!)

Wait and watch the liquor settle.

I could stand whole dayfuls of it.

Wind she brews a heady kettle.

Human beings love it—love it.

Gods above are not above it.

–Robert Frost

If you’re a fellow Frost fan, there’s a Robert Frost tribute coming up April 7, a fund-raiser for the Caffe Lena in Saratoga, with a terrific musical duo, the Lost Radio Rounders. More info later.

http://www.lostradiorounders.com/?section=calendar