This poem paints winter as if on canvas, its palette borrowed from Degas and Van Gogh. The everyday becomes luminous: swans flying close, sunsets spilling across the sky, old streetlights glowing against snow. At once visual and musical, the poem carries the reader from festive holidays into quiet recall, where even the birds--robins, blackbirds--become strokes of color and character. It celebrates art’s power to suffuse ordinary life with beauty and memory.

This morning Degas was having fun with pastel.
Then a swan flew so close that you thought
That you could step outside and touch him.

Then at five pm the sun splashed Van Gogh’s palette,
And umber squiggles struck a chord:
Through orange, blue and red. But how to explain!

I think one would understand if I said that
It was like hearing a choir of angels strum.
And then you say that nothing happens now

The holidays are done, and visitors have gone home:
To work, to school. Back up north, down south, and east;
And they will have brought with them recall

Of our hamlet's old street lights: Their yellow glow
Reflecting nightly snow. The berry's rosy blush.
The birds that skated on the ice, a robin's cheek.

And blackbirds too full for flight their bellies
Hanging over spindly feet. The ones,
You said, that needed braces and britches.

FLM (Mari Fitzpatrick)