Another Rejected Poem of Winter

Anti-Yungian Death Sentence

The road-side snow grows hollow, wrinkled, shrivled,
carved by snowmobiles, shrunken by sun,
scraped off and piled, gray like road scum,
like the cinder block clouds it came from...

The mountain-side snow stands sculpted
into place, determined to stay, hiding from sun
that only briefly reaches through the scrum
of trees protecting it. Each rock is a crumb

of homicidal heat in marshmallow--s'mored
by sappy maples, buds nearly toward sun
melting sugary white with yellow tongue.
The trees--like an albino's eyelashes--hum,

providing contrast, vibrating on white-skinned
shadows--abraded and afraid of the ascending sun
come to make it bleed before it finally succumbs
to the ubiquitous, incessant, violent green young.

Scott Supak

Hall of Fame Baseball Outing Called on because of Snow

We were going to Cooperstown today anyway, actually. While there, it was hard to resist taking some pictures of the Baseball Hall of Fame covered in a slushy six inches of new snow. Finally. We were getting jealous of all the southerners getting all the snow.

It was a winter wonderland this morning, and it was already melting when we got there, but it still made for some great Baseball Hall of Fame desktop wallpaper pictures I just posted over at the free wallpaper backgrounds blog.

This winter wallpaper picture was taken not far from the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. at the south east end of Lake Otsego, where the lake drains into a creek that is the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, it almost immediately becomes this little lake, behind the Cooperstown Waterworks damn. If you look at the big version, you'll see a beautiful stone bridge at the north end of the little lake. Picturesque indeed. Feel free to download all the shots over at the blog, they all make great free desktop wallpaper backgrounds!

Poetry After Years of None

Thousands of Tiny Taps Almost at Once

Almost frozen rain drops bounce
off slanted glass: molten BBs
the second impact of which
humans can barely detect.

The defroster-warmed windshield
lubricates the basal slide,
a glacial race across car parts
toward salted road like wrist blood

down fingers. Red and blue sirens
intermittently flash blinding,
weary authority from cops, ambulances,
and plow apparatus-strapped pickups.

The shorting-neon bar-sign effect prisms
through each half-flattened drop in the mire--
Tetris-piled-ice sky-scrapers, an opaque
cityscape on a bedrock of wiper blades.

Flip the switch! See a civilization
destroyed! The rubber barbarian
horde squeegees the watery wen
into compressed detritus, then resets.

Oil-fueled blades slice ice aside
into dross monoliths, offal sacrifices
destined to feed roadside sluices.
Obliviously eager new sleet

floods the excavated tabula rasa--
the abhorred-vacuum, now a province
filled by termites, protected witnesses,
contraceptive sponges, and colonists.

Gravity hauls the slush across
the transparent Diolkos, unaware
of its shivering nakedness, bare
liquid held together by sheer

temperature like exposed, decrepit
houses in leafless woods,
revealed only in winter,
about to be obliterated.

Scott Supak
February, 2009