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Something There Is That Doesn't Love A Snowman

The snowman we made last night had been trampled this morning when we awoke, by a chaos of children. His twig arms lay under snow like avalanche victims. His carroty nose was simply no longer present at the scene. His small stone eyes were unaccounted for. He was a gone snowman. He was the snowman who wasn't there. What drives someone to eradicate a snowman? Is it the nature of the materials? Is being built of snow an invitation to break what will melt into air anyway? Nature abhors a melting creature. What isn't solid gets knocked down to size. Molecules scatter, crystals dissipate, the melting white gentle thing dissolves and is forgotten, in the blizzard that is creation, in the murder that is the blizzard. One has to have a mind like an icepick to pick apart a snowman, or just be a wild child, running across snow, perhaps never so deeply seen before. Snowmen are invisible in snow, like poems are in a world of prose.

Comments

Dave King said…
I have a theory: the folk who knock down sandcastles are moving inland. (of course, if you live on the coast, that buggers that theory!)
Anonymous said…
But was your snowman any good? Out there with the kids this morning, our efforts (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannybirchall/3247455160/) were put to shame. I realised that whatever I've learnt in the past thirty years, it isn't how to make snowmen better.
Carol Ann Duffy mate. She's got previous for robbing snowmen.
Janet Vickers said…
Perhaps the being is not a child but a creature that has had joy scared out of it. What shall we call these creatures for they are becoming more apparent.
Amy Rose Walter said…
A young boy i live with told me how it it took him all day to work out how to make a snowman because he thought you made them like sandcastles. Once he'd worked it out, his brother ate his snowman's nose.
James Midgley said…
I fear Janet may be right (in the broad sense). Still, your entry makes for something approaching a prose poem, which is nice. I owe you a copy of Mimesis 5 as yet. Will see to that.

Best to you,
J
Anonymous said…
Poor snowman....

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