The robin waits as I pour hot water into the birdbath, slowly melting the ice. For most of this day I think there won’t be any quote to continue this book of the winter, then I find this passage in my 1850 W.Pickering copy of Taylor’s Holy Dying, and the phrase “they dwell upon ice” finds a place here.


Holy Dying


Man never hath one day to himself of entire peace from the things of this world; but either something troubles him, or nothing satisfies...

This morning snatches of Moonlight on Vermont ring out across the snow, across the frozen reservoirs , the stilled airports and stalled motorways of the U.K. The BBC Radio Four news marks the passing of Captain Beefheart , adopted as one of our own, loved here for his humour, his originality and his failure to find conventional success. Cherished by the beloved John Peel and a generation of musicians and writers and bedroom dreamers. He still comes rumbling through our petrified forest.
...

Dada artist, refugee, master of the spicileging arts. Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948.)


Ice Clocks



Boil clocks boil breathe ice

Ember crumbles ember simmer ice

Clocks cook clocks ice simmer ember

Clocks cook ice

Mimosa, orange, aphrodite, tulip flora, aphrodite.

I drift through life a dead fish.




Trans.Jerome Rothenberg....

When George Mackay Brown had his first collection The Storm published by the Orkney Press in 1954. Edwin Muir wrote in the forward: "Grace is what I find in these poems."



Weather Bestiary



The unicorn melts through his prism. Sodden hooves
Have deluged the corn with light.


A fisherman wets his finger. The eyelash
Of the grey stallion flicks his blood with cold....

A strange exploration: Fridtjof Nansen took his ship Fram and froze her into the pack-ice in the Eastern Arctic Ocean, then waited for the drift to carry her towards the North Pole. Impatient with the slow speed and erratic character of the journey, after 18 months Nansen and a chosen companion, Hjalmar Johansen, left the ship with a team of dogs and sledges and made for the pole. They did not reach it, but they achieved a record Farthest North latitude of 86°13.6'N before a long retreat over ice...