Cold Weather and Winter Poems

It's cold today, in Kansas. Very cold. We have a few new inches of snow on the ground and awful, blustery winds bullying it into drifts. It should be even colder tomorrow, with a high of only one degree.

Yes, ONE.

So I've had winter poems on my mind. One of my old favorites is Stevens's "The Snow Man," but I was hoping to post something here from Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks. Kooser wrote the book as a series of dated postcards which he mailed to his friend and fellow poet Jim Harrison. The poems tell the story of Kooser's battle with cancer, and each poem is short and sad and quite beautiful.

But I couldn't find any poems from this book on-line. Instead I found this one: "Daddy Longlegs" from Flying at Night. The first two lines alone make it worth a read. No one could describe a daddy long-legs better: "on fine long legs springy as steel, / a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill."

Kooser's a great poet for stating the obvious in a beautiful way. I read this poem and thought, of course this is how I always feel when I come across a lone spider! I'm always a little sad at the smallness of its life, how contained it is within its tiny self, but I'm always a little happy, too, with a sense of wonder that such a small contraption could live. But this is a cocktail of emotions that I've never tried to put into words before. But Kooser does that job for me here, and he does so wonderfully.

I'm also interested in how the spider changes throughout the poem. At first, the spider is just himself. Then his legs become ribs, and those ribs become a web (how strange to compare a spider's body to a spider's web!), and then the spider becomes Kooser himself in all its solitude and minute containment.

The way Kooser uses his spider reminds me of how John Donne uses the image of a flea in "The Flea": the critters transform again and again, mirroring the poets' mental gymnastics until, metaphorically, they are much, much more than themselves.

 

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Daddy Longlegs

by Ted Kooser

From the Poetry Foundation

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,

a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill

that skims along over the basement floor

wrapped up in a simple obsession.

Eight legs reach out like the master ribs

of a web in which some thought is caught

dead center in its own small world,

a thought so far from the touch of things

that we can only guess at it. If mine,

it would be the secret dream

of walking alone across the floor of my life

with an easy grace, and with love enough

to live on at the center of myself.