Golden Harvest, with apologies to Wallace Stevens

A beautiful fall day, my front porch rail, a Mason jar, one blue jay feather, a sprig of red berries, and three hickory nuts, their cases with the smell of home, that sharp pull of earth and childhood: even my humble jar pulled the "wilderness" around it and "took dominion."

Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround the hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The Nothing That Is

Before it fell, all day Saturday, and after it fell, all day Sunday, early snow has blanketed my spirit, leaving me cold.
I can think only of Wallace Stevens' poem, "The Snow Man":

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.