SOLASTALGIA AND "THE SNOW MAN"

Image: M irja Pljakka/by kind permission I woke before dawn to distant low rumbling and a whistle, faint and attenuated: the early freight train moving through the valley. Snow had fallen overnight, enough to insulate the house a little and to reveal the tracks of creatures that move around outside it: squirrels, wild turkeys, propane delivery truck, us. "One must have a mind of winter," goes Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man" , to meet its beauty -- "junipers shagged with ice," "distant glitter," the sound of wind in dry leaves -- and not to "think / Of any misery" there. I could say the passing train sounded lonely, or cold, or plangent. It did stir those feelings. I could note that the snow over the chrysanthemums struck some grief-chord that chrysanthemums without a snow cover don't. What would it mean to have a mind of winter? Out there things are cold, still, dormant. Would it be a mind like that? Or wou