Trying to keep going a fire which wants to hiss more than flame, UD turns from the hearth to her snowy windows and thinks There must be a poem for this. She thinks of Wallace Stevens – The Snow Man – but she has read and thought about that poem for a long time, and she wants a different poem, a newer poem, about the snow. Something after Stevens.

She finds this:

In Whose Unctions
By Greg Glazner

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.

*************************************

The listener in the snow, in the Stevens poem, is “nothing himself,” and “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” So this is a deathly white, a ghost’s stillness, in which even for the non-ghost the blank that underlies the living world exhibits itself when the world is blanketed.

In Glazner’s post-Stevens snow-listening, things are different.

Here rather than nihilism’s exhibitionist, the snow is a balm, an unction, a salving. The snow isn’t the fallen snow of Stevens; it’s snow still falling, making the world whir with motion rather than settling on and crusting the boughs of trees.

And even if this snow does settle, it’s an easing of jangled nerves, a softening, and a rightness, rather than a death revealed.

The poem now begins to explore its rich central simile: The snow is falling

as in the spackled whites,
the woodgrains of a room’s hush
before music,

From exterior to interior, we consider the white flakes inside the grained wood of a music room where a string quartet is about to perform. As the snow “rights” the world, the spackled – repaired – wood, the wood whose gaps have been closed by white spackles, “rights” the room, makes it beautiful, and softens it – diminuendos it – in preparation for the sound about to be made. The snow, like the softened grained wood, is a kind of preconditioning, a preparation of the world for life. The softened world of the music room exists to put into relief

a lush legato in whose unctions
the excruciations ease

The snow eases the

live nerves of the wire fence
and the firs

Our live-wire life, excruciatingly jangly, is soothed and righted by the gorgeous descents of snow and music.

as in the first
thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods
of the late quartets,

Clever, no? The wood of the musical instruments, part of the interior “wood” which is the music room, opens with a lush somewhat harsh sawing, if you will, of the opening notes of, say, Beethoven; though UD is made to think of Jacqueline Du Pre’s Elgar Concerto. The thick heavy profundo from the cello’s wood, not yet part, in these opening notes, of a detectable rhythm, changes us as we listen to it, breaks in a special way the silence of the room. This

dense snow of emotion,
downdrifting,
formal,
whose violins and cellos,
desiring the exhilarations of changes,
turn loose an infusion
of wintry music, [is] all sideslip and immense descent

Now we explicitly draw them together, the snow and the tones, the tones generating a thick, dense covering over of our ordinary jangliness with becalmed snows of emotion (or if you prefer, music hath charms to soothe the savage breast); but doing more than the literal snow because these tones are “formal,” allowing “the exhilarations of changes.” This beautiful sound is

salving down into the still air,
the wound,
the listening.

**************************

This poem reminds me that my favorite poetry collection title is James Merrill’s The Fire Screen, because that’s what art is – the thing we have in order not to perish of the truth, the thing that strategically protects us from the worst even as it finds ways to bring us the worst, or at least to make us feel the furnace blast of the worst. In the Stevens poem you get the truth without shading; in Glazner’s you have the snow screen, the art screen.