A Sur-reply to Wallace Stevens

I wrote this stanza answering to a double prompt - (i) a photo (copied below) that I saw posted on Facebook of footsteps trailing off in a field of snow, which basically looked like a calligraphy for half of a Chinese character or so, and (ii) Wallace Stevens' great poem The Snowman.

For the wanderer

Who treks through the snow

And beholds the Nothing

That is there along with

Various other things 

Paled by abstraction
And contingency 

The title of this poem is a cross-reference to a few of my earlier poems that were addressed to Stevens, including one which you can read by clicking here.   But what this new stanza reflects is how lately I've been considering whether The Snowman reflects a Buddhist view of Nothing (as a number of American critics seem to think it does)  as opposed to that of an American modernist insurance executive?  There are many types of Nothing and Stevens, for the most part, seems to stick to thinking about it in a spare positivist framework, at least that's how his mind of winter strikes me - not quite yet inclined to see Enlightenment as the ultimate payoff of Emptiness.

The mind of winter may also be the least of it.  How about this as a further sur-reply: 

For the wanderer

Who treks through the snow

And beholds the Nothing

That is there and even more so

Knows not just the sheer abstraction

Of the landscape but also

Endures its coldest contingencies

Must contend with something

Much more severe than

The mere mind of winter