#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Death Bridge in Snow, Charles River
“Death is one of the most moving and troubling experiences of life. Death in life is one of the most terrible states of existence.. . Being right or wrong, don’t be indifferent. Don’t be nothing. Poetry. . .could help us recreate worlds. Many poets, many readers live by poetry as people have lived by religion. Both are rituals, patterns, that give special meaning to the most profound experiences of human life. Plath’s teaching notes suggest that her reading of modernist texts, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Yeats, gave her the aesthetic tools and thematic confidence to transform her suicide attempt, into high art in ‘The Bell Jar.’”
~ Heather Clark quoting Sylvia Plath’s Smith College Teaching Lecture Notes, in “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath”
Powdery flakes fell all night and into daylight. Thousands and millions of soft, silent melt-drops into the river. I ski into the Trustees in the super-silk and freshness of the trail. Effortlessly, a long ski. What beauty to be here in a February snowfall as sweet as this one. The dogs are cheerful, light on their feet in the powder. All day it falls without stopping, without changing temperature. A steady mood of white ease inches and inches into the day. Frank gets his vaccine appointment for next week and feels like getting through the .gov website is like winning the lottery. To be still, under trees, near evergreen branches, in sight of the river, black and slowly moving in the middle of iced edges, to stand still near a bridge, in the falling snow, it’s a kind of grace.
