Who grows tired of summer's hot embrace?
I for one, who have memorized the season
And stared down its pompous face.
The boiling sap, the green earth-tremors,
The copper coils of July
That super-heat the air
Until an old man sweats and frets around the yard.
I could love a winter's stern touch
That puts an end to the garden's misery
And shakes the bean vine from its crutch,
That bares the world to every eye
And dries the mind that's grown too soft
To last another month of mud and pollen passions.
The storm I waited a year to see
Caught me on a mountain's shattered keyboard
Setting its sleepy substance free
To drift on an owl's wind,
To catch and prey on trees that no cold touch could wake.
On a broken stone I made my stand
Alone as anyone could be
And was happy enough to be alone.
A pearl-winged angel could do no more
Than watch the triumphs of the frozen sun,
Honoring winter in silence
And with a silent mind.
Find me a child pulling a sled
Whose laughter stops the rabbit dead
In its run to spring.
Tell me that his cheeks are red
And that his eyes are calling out of ice
Their cheer and fury.
Tell me there is a trace of winter in his lungs.
And when burly winds stampede and whinny by the door,
Find me a child whose nest is on the floor,
Whose dreams break like waves before the fire,
Who loves a winter's touch enough to flower
In the snow-spun spirit of November.
"""""".
I wrote this poem when I was still in high school, age 17 or 18. I think my inspiration was an actual snowfall that "caught me" when I was walking on a remote hillside on the outskirts of my hometown in Connecticut. The "pearl-winged angel" who can "do no more than honor the triumphs of the frozen sun . . . with a silent mind", was probably the stone angel in a Victorian churchyard, who, fair or not, was the muse of the Romantic poets, who were losing their sway over me. Let me explain: As a young writer, I had been straddling the Romantic poets (like Wordsworth, Shelly and Keats) and the "modern" poets like Pound and Eliot, ever since TS Eliot was introduced to me by my eighth grade English teacher. I was still in love with hyperbolic, over-the-top-language, the kind that sweeps one along like a wave or a river. As an adolescent I "got" hyperbole; I had a lot of respect for the power of passionate emotions, like the anger I stuffed when I was humiliated by a bully, and what it felt like to fall in and out of love, and the agony of jealousy that felt like I was being ripped apart. The Romantic poets were good at evoking such emotions, the very ones that Freud warned us about, that could sink a civilization! But at the same time, my intellect was waking up and very soon, within a few years, I would step into the realm of my right brain which was just waiting in the wings of my mind to unlock the quantum energy of analogy and archetypal symbolism. I was writing symbolic poetry, but it took Jung to awaken me to the intimate and numinous relationship between analogy and symbolism and metaphor, which together provided me with the key to getting out of the high security prison of mediocrity, which 50 years later I would rebrand The Matrix.
The mountain's "shattered" keyboard was my attempt to describe an actual hillside of huge fragments of granite left by the ice-age that were in the process of being slowly forested over by oaks, that, if they are still standing, would now be a hundred years old. Why shattered? I imagined that those fragments of granite were the black and white keys of a piano, perhaps the keyboard of the piano my father struggled to play Mozart on. See, at the time, I wanted no part of the Romantic or the classical world. I was about to wake up to my own "cheer and fury" around stepping into my own Dreaming, which was young and naive but also old and wise at the same time.