A Deep River Year 2017

Yesterday was a spring-like day--almost 60 degrees--when it was almost possible to forget that it was still February in New England. We knew what was coming. All the weather forecasters were predicting a big snow for today, and as usual, folks raced to the grocery stores to stock up on batteries, bread and milk as if they would be stranded for weeks.


Today I got up at daybreak in hopes of taking the dogs for their morning walk before the snow started.... The streets were quiet, the sidewalks empty, and the dogs' noses were in the air as if they scented something coming. We were covered in white by the time we stomped through the back door, and I had just a little time to fill a few of the bird feeders. All day long the blizzard blew. Inside, we were warm, safe. This good day provided a time to stop and rest, to go nowhere except in memory. To be a boy again, on a sled with metal runners, flying down a snow-covered hill. To make angels in the drifts, build snow forts and an arsenal of snowballs, and to come inside with numb fingers for hot cocoa. To sense the silence that fills the space between our heartbeats and which holds the moments which have not yet unfolded.

 Snowstorm


It is morning, early,
and I walk upstream,
into a current of wind,
and I am snow.
It blows across the world,
bearing the scent of prairies
and the pulse of oceans.
Later the birds swarm
beneath swaying feeders,
answering an ancient call
to stoke their meager engines
against the cold,
even as they sing.
And we, too, seek some sustenance
in this forbidding weather:
sip our coffee,
and stay still in kind, familiar rooms
as winter's breath rattles windows
where we stand and watch
the silence pile up
on our drifted hills.

A Deep River Year 2017

Tonight somebody down at Deep River's Swede Club should walk over to the juke box and play Don McLean's "American Pie." All the old-timers there know the words, or most of them, and they will sip their beer and sing along with the chorus. Because today is the "day the music died." On February 3, 1959, rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The... Big Bopper" Richardson were killed in a plane crash shortly after takeoff in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa. They had been on a "winter dance party" tour that was to take them to Morehead, Minnesota, the next day, and their manager had arranged to fill an empty date at the dance hall in Clear Lake.

Buddy Holly was cold and tired and couldn't imagine sitting on a bus for the long ride up to Minnesota, so he chartered a small plane. Waylon Jennings was supposed to fly with him, but he traded places with Richardson. Ritchie Valens won a seat with a coin toss at the end of the night's concert. Years later Don McLean memorialized the tragedy with his 8-minute song, full of mysterious illusions and apocalyptic imagery. I still am sad that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost "caught that last train to the coast." Today's youth may have no understanding of the tragedy of that event, or of the impact it had on another generation of teenagers.

But we all, at sometime in our live, have some dire day like that, when "in the streets the children screamed/ the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed/ but not a word was spoken." Today you can drive to that cornfield in Iowa, which is marked by a larger-than-life pair of horn-rimmed glasses like the ones Buddy Holly wore. And we still listen to Don McLean's song, which proves, if nothing else, that the music hasn't died. It never will.

The Book of Love

So they go,
one after the other,
the lovers and poets
and the ones who sang us to sleep
or who awakened us
to the dream which is life.
So many of them are gone.
But they still make music
for our winter dances,
still break the silence
when the church bells are broken.
And we hear them,
their wild and hopeful songs,
making us believe, and laugh,
and fall in love again.
even after the day
their music drifted
one night
into snow,
into silence.