The Snow Principle        Out of the winter branches, a small brown body, a sparrow's, fluttered toward me, downward in feathery disarray, turning ungracefully in a tumult of legs and wings, and fell at my feet. I saw that it was headless. I guessed that its head had been struck off by an owl or hawk that had seen me and had not followed its meal to the snow...        But this never happened. It looks as though I was the one who struck off the sparrow's head — maybe just to be able to explain one sentence by way of another. And for the pleasure of picture and movement, everything taking place, as always, even in summer, against such snow as this. William Heyen Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry BOA Editions, Ltd. Copyright © 1998 by William Heyen. All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.