how is it that the snow

How Is It That the Snow
by Robert Haight

How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?

Some deer have stood on their hind legs
to pull the berries down.
Now they are ghosts along the path,
snow flecked with red wine stains.

This silence in the timbers.
A woodpecker on one of the trees
taps out its story,
stopping now and then in the lapse
of one white moment into another.

an inward heat

We step hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. 

Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.

— Henry David Thoreau, A Winter Walk, 1843

Luke, and Ara

Luke

by Mary Oliver

I had a dog
  who loved flowers.
     Briskly she went
         through the fields,

yet paused
   for the honeysuckle
     or the rose,
        her dark head

and her wet nose
   touching
      the face
         of every one

with its petals
  of silk,
    with its fragrance
      rising

into the air
  where the bees,
    their bodies
      heavy with pollen,

hovered—
  and easily
    she adored
      every blossom,

not in the serious,
  careful way
    that we choose
      this blossom or that blossom—

the way we praise or don’t praise—
  the way we love
    or don’t love—
      but the way

we long to be—
  that happy
    in the heaven of earth—
      that wild, that loving.

Run in Peace in your new heaven, Ara dog, 

gentle friend and companion, 

family member, just six years old.