I found David Budbill’s lovely poem about winter copied into an old notebook.
It’s so short, I don’t see a way of giving you a sense of it with an excerpt. So here it is:
Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.
Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,
cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space
to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.
I hope Budbill, who died in 2016, would forgive me for reproducing the whole thing. By way of atonement, I’ll spread the word that a new edition of his book Judevine is coming out in April.
A good friend and I have been exchanging notes about the nature of time and about how it can be measured objectively and yet experienced in many subjective ways. I’m partial to “holed-up pulled-in time and space.”
• Sources and notes: “Winter is the Best Time” appeared in While We’ve Still Got Feet; Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2005. I found a copy at Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. It’s here:
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2012%252F01%252F28.html
If you’d like to hear Budbill’s voice, you can find a recording of him singing “What Issa Heard” at his website:
For a note on a conversation with the poet, see “The brief wonders of David Budbill,” Nov. 11, 2021. It’s here:
https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-brief-wonders-of-david-budbill.html
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