Winter has been slow to arrive.
Just last week, a parade of 50-degree days,
One after another,
Seemed like late March or April,
Not the end of January.
Unlikely activities replaced skiing for a bit.
Biking at Wild and Scenic Rivers,
Lying out, bare-skinned arms and legs at Ojo,
Sitting by the edge of the Rio Grande
As clouds surprisingly burned off.
Two old friends
Watched a small blue hole,
Allow the penetrating warmth of the sun,
Expand into a cloudless luminous sky.
Layers of down were pulled off
And placed over a bed of dry grasses,
Rimmed with a sheltering curtain of red willows.
The river ran a frigid snow-melted color of green clarity,
Before exploding into a wild display of sun-reflected riffles,
Accompanied by a surprising variety of dancing water sounds.
Meditative rhythms of spell-binding song,
Broken occasionally by ducks flying an up-stream course.
Together in a not-so-distant eddy,
Noisy splashdowns,
Feathered wings flapping.
But today, the smallest of white particles,
I can hardly call them flakes,
Almost imperceptibly,
Fall and drizzle earthbound.
Hour by hour, their steady determination accumulates,
Creating heavy dense mounds of snow,
Weighing down the branches of pinon and cedar and ponderosa pine.
Sporadic dark bird-forms
Of juncos, chick-a-dees and steller’s jays
Streak the silent greyness of the day.
Finally, the forests sigh
With the much needed
Promise of moisture-laden snowpack.
