now will I sing

 the river is starting to freeze

That line from a Leonard Cohen song haunts me today. A muted sort of day as a heavy wet snow blows and accumulates. I don't know if the rivers are freezing, but I know that our cars have disappeared into the driveway and the baby horse a couple of acres away is experiencing her first real snowfall which seems to exhilarate as she suddenly takes off, kicks back legs and gallops. But never too far or too long away from her mother, white, who has definitely disappeared into the landscape. So I'm disappearing into my warm house, writing, reading on my Kindle,  I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons (excellent) and knitting Dante's sweater which is going super fast. I bought the yarn, Lamb's Pride Worsted "tormented teal" on Wednesday! I'll start the sleeves later.

the life of...
as I read the biography of Cohen, many of his past books are mentioned. Remembering something vague, I searched my bookshelves and found an old 1968 poetry collection, The Spice-Box of Earth. I bought it used decades ago and it still survives. In all the moving and giving away of books through the years, somehow this slim paperback survived.

...and it's pretty fragile at this point. This altitude with its dry air is hell on paperback books. So I carefully leaf through the pages and read poems I haven't looked at in ages, recognize some that became songs, and note a line in the current bio from an early publisher of his work: "we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good."  Caveat: I think he's great. And the bio is a compelling and informative read.

never lament casually
     L. Cohen