Lingering high pressure has given us foggy yet mostly dry weather, unusual in December. Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the middle of winter (not the first day of winter, but midwinter, just as June 21 is midsummer's day). After today, the days will be getting longer!
Mirror Pond in Rooster Rock State Park. Swans hang out here in the winter.
Time to get poetic:
Some Trees by John Ashbery
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbour, as though speech
Were still a performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Mean something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defence.
