The Snow Painter
In the Musee des Beaux-Artes at Rouen, France they keep their best paintings in the corner. A tiny room, a third the size of most in the gallery, it contains several Impressionist classics, including Monet’s take on the cathedral from St. Catherine’s Hill and a windblown plazascape which makes you shiver and feel alone in the world.
But the painting that grabbed my heart was Alfred Sisley’s take on a couple walking towards (or away from?) a village in the snow. So much sentiment he packed into the painting, so many suggestions… why do we go out in the snow? To be cold? Why? It’s these really naive but also really old questions that really interest me.
This poem is an obvious riff on Wallace Steven’s The Snow Man. It’s not the first time I’ve riffed it, and it definitely won’t be the last – I love The Snow Man, and have a relationship with it, and my appreciation of winter and snow is colored by it.
My writing is a lot like my cooking. I make the same dishes over and over again, refining them, twisting them, learning the role each ingredient plays, and always paying homage the source.
The Snow Painter
Sisley made his mind into winter
in order to describe
two intwined in the white hush
crunching towards town, the inn
where smoke rose from the chimney –
And far from misery, Sisley
said without a word how it’s better
to be cold, and going to be warm
than to be warm forever –
January now. Wait. Make warm soon.
She crunched. Accompanied him to the inn.
Couldn’t conceive an other that wasn’t.
Even the land is composed of our ticks
tocking to the wind which is cold, or isn’t –
no snow can deny her her perceiving.