“In Whose Unctions” by Greg Glazner

I miss the snow.

Last fall, I was in California for the first time in many years. I rejoiced not to be freezing or seeing snowflakes in mid-October, which is usual in both Chicago and Denver (where I had been living). But I also began to miss the snow. It has such power to transfigure the landscape, overnight, and make it shining, white, and beautiful.

The other day, I met poet Greg Glazner, and I recently read a poem of his about snowfall. It made me think of the silence of snow but also the music of winter, which humans inevitably play to protect their hearts from cold. Here is the poem …

In Whose Unctions

By now the snow is easing

the live nerves of the wire fence

and the firs,

                              softening the distances it falls through,

laying down a rightness,

as in the spackled whites,

the woodgrains of a room’s hush

                                                                  before music,

before a lush legato in whose unctions

the excruciations ease,

                                            as in the first

thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods

                                                                        of the late quartets,

whose dense snow of emotion,

                                                         downdrifting,

formal,

                 whose violins and cellos,

desiring the exhilarations of changes,

                                                                          turn loose an infusion

of wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent,

repetitions, evolutions

salving down into the still air,

                                                         the wound,

the listening.

Greg Glazner

from Poetry (February 2012)