Snow Blind

image borrowed from ibtimes.co.uk 

Snow Blind

“Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

--Vladimir Nabokov.

Snow is like scotch--

you instinctually love it or hate it. 

A lot of people adore snow,

                        become impatient waiting for it,

                        praying for it, doing snow dances,

                        before playing in it, never losing 

              a child’s sense of wonder about winter,

              using arctic foxes & snowshoe rabbits as their totems. 

Descending the stairs

on my snow-covered deck,          I slip,        cracking my tailbone

                                  during my painful journey to the icy sidewalk. 

A snowscape looks blissful, beautiful, peaceful on

                      a Grandma Moses painting,

                      a Norman Rockwell magazine cover

                      a Hallmark greeting card,

                      an Ansel Adams photograph,  or

                      a ski resort poster, but while

Lying on my back in 6 inches of hard-packed snow

mantling a sheet of ice on the street,

putting on tire chains          so that I can get out of my driveway

                       & negotiate my side street, only to take them off

                       in a parking lot before driving on the freeway,

wearing rubber angler’s overalls

                                       to keep my slacks presentable, 

                       the metal on the chains

                       blistering my bare hands because

my bulky snow mittens were too clumsy--

it doesn’t look too pretty to me. 

In the northern part of our state,

near the Canadian border,             the Mt. Baker ski area

                      holds the world record for accumulated snowfall

                      at 1,140 inches, or 95 feet.

Skiers & snowboarders consider it Nirvana. 

There are over a half million

homeless people in this country         and every damn winter

                       2000 of them die of hyperthermia

                      as the polar vortex has its way with them,

                      partly because the shelters were full,

                      or didn’t open their doors until the temps

were freezing, so a third of the homeless faced the snow

without any shelter at all. 

I wouldn’t say I suffered from Chionophobia,

but it seems that I have always detested snow,

                                       actually dreaming of strangling snowflakes,

                                       all six sides of them, while

                         spraining my back shoveling snow, or

                   losing track of my car in the 6 foot drifts created

by the roaring helpful snow plows.

Did you know that snow falls at 3 m.p.h,

that every winter, one septillion snowflakes fall,

(that is one with 24 zeros),

that snow is actually clear & colorless, 

that an average snowflake is made up of     

                    180 billion molecules of water?

                     Neither did I.

Residing, as I do,       hemmed in by two nearby mountain ranges,

                      with more than half the population nestled

                 on hillsides, with steep driveways--just 6 inches of snow

turns everything into a tortuous mad carnival ride,

                 causing thousands of wrecks, injuries, heart attacks

                       & mental breakdowns.

But the snow gods do not touch me

as much now that I am retired, 

sitting warmly in my hovel watching

the traffic snarls only on television,

                  having the leisure to be haunted 

                              once more by the sepia photos shown to me

                                                by an older friend,

                                          of nude Swedish women skiers, 

                                          when I was ten, &

knew very little about women 

& still enjoyed snow. 

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets Poetics

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