A Valentine for Snow

The ice twinkles – what a lovely word, twinkles – twinkle toes, my mother used to call me -

the ice in the sunlight twinkles, sparkles, flickers, the way stars do, bright with flashes of red and blue, minute planets – they are sputtering out signals, codes of their unbecoming – the sun is dashing them to the ground -

a mocking bird just crashed against the branch and shakes a crowd of snow -

this beauty out of my window and I am of this same world and that is my eternally springing joy -

oh, at the base of my spine, where the bony nerve-wrapped ending sits, that’s where I can feel it – oh world, oh lover, are you truly mine, am I one face of your multi-valentine?

My mind leaps to the gopis, those Hindu cowgirls flush with love for horny blue Krishna – the rapture of worship -

Romantic love is not the same as Worship Love, but the compelling sense of one’s humble adoration in the presence of a powerful beauty is the same -

A slice of ice flamed into a ruby three times, then streaked to join the slushing -

I remember stepping into the woods in thigh-deep snow in the Sierra Nevadas on a camping trip with my church youth group. I wasn’t familiar at all with snow and ice, being a native of Southern California’s dry, omnipresent heat. The holiness in that silence was palpable. The beauty stung coldly against my tender face. I felt the breath of god in the sweet, crystalline air, and sunk in the heaviness to my knees, undone by it all, by the All.

Love does that to me.

But seriously – how many must ask it – I know I am not the first one – do we need to mine for diamonds when these trees offer freely their encrusted shining selves?

Wrap me in the melting cuts of  ice; adorn me with precious frost. I am sufficiently bedecked.