I added a picture to this poem, so that you would have a better sense of the scene that prompted this reflection. You'll have to go to the main page to see it, though. 

Fresh snow coats the spiky crowns of evergreens

into narrow cones of shining white

steepled against a brillig sky -- 

a vast convocation 

of pointy white hoods.

Do spruce trees also

have pointy little brains

beneath their whited hoods?

            A friend is going through a deep depression.  I tried to imagine myself inside his skin, and out came another poem. It begins

Dimness descends like a curtain.

Murk buries me, plugs my nostrils,

seals my ears; I hear nothing,

not even my own thoughts.

I wallow in my private pig-sty.

I want to move, but my muscles

have turned to water; every step feels like

wading in molasses....

This poem when my friend Arlene Erickson, hearing about what ministers have been taught in most seminaries since the 1950s, demanded, “Why haven’t we ordinary people been told any of this stuff?” Something about the content led me to put it together in lines vaguely resembling the discipline of iambic pentameter.

“Behold,” he said, “thy path unto salvation.”

“What path?” I asked, “for all that I can see 

are thickets of incomprehension; thorns

that reach to snare unwary travellers,

quicksand salivating for a sucker,

roots that rise to trip my thoughts; and tigers 

burning bright, crouched to leap with tooth 

and claw upon my slightest flaw.

I have never been able to meditate the way some others do. Either I fall asleep, or my mind races. So I wrote about it. 

Silence is a pool, deep and green.

I sink into its welcoming womb. 

I empty my mind

            thinking of nothing 

                        nothing at all 

            but nothing abhors a vacuum....

Two matched verses, connecting two natural events. 

The waterfall 

clings to the edge of an abyss

with its fingernails....

An old man 

clings to the edge of an abyss....