Thursday night, as I tuned into the news on my headphones during my commute, it hit me that the “bitter cold snap” that was currently slapping me in the face and made my nostrils scream was also taking a toll on my mood. I don’t do well in cold like this. Every little errand takes longer (mittens off, mittens back on), certain achy toes or knees don’t function as well (which is more of a resentment directed at Father Time rather than Mother Nature), and the whole experience me in a generally cantankerous mood as I navigate over the unmelted now ice near my place out to the small patch of sidewalk that has been somewhat shoveled. But what I hate most about saying that is the fact that it’s worse, much worse even, in other places.
Still, when the forecasters were proven right and the ground was painted white once more on Friday, I was grumpy. I blame this entirely on having a lovely sister who now lives in Phoenix and the fact this year, I was there on Christmas day, hiking in 60 degree weather and running each morning to the site of a hazy winter sun rising over palm trees.
But what of poetry and how on earth is a two paragraph session linked in some way to anything worth reading? I’m in a funk, feeling down and out mostly because of the paralyzing weather, or so I’m telling myself, but at least there are ways of processing this and using poetry to wiggle back out. I have the first line of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” It’s such a simple poem but the first line “so much depends upon…” became one of my favorite assignments in school. A mentor once assigned a small group to write something that began with that. I think it would be interesting for everyone-- not just poets or writers or philosophers—but everyone to think once in a while what so much depends upon.
For WCW, so much depended upon:
“a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens."
And that was it, at least that was it that day or for that poem. For me so much depends upon the weather sometimes. And this is one of the reasons I spent 4 hours this morning re-reading one of my favorite authors, James Joyce. In Dubliners, snow is not just a plot device or a typical Irish piece of sentimental symbolism, it’s a character. I should know, because I said it was when I argued it out so persuasively once in a paper that was supposed to be a 10 pager on “symbolism in Dubliners” and turned into a 40 page dissection of the short stories. Boy did I used to be a know-it-all. Thank goodness the kind academic who read that paper not only gave me an okay grade, but agreed to be my thesis advisor and then took me down a few notches.
But Joyce knew how to write a story that connects with people, transcending gender, generation or lifetime. Here is one line from the aforementioned collection:
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Today’s poem is a Treegap original. Started a while ago from a newspaper clipping, it’s given new life. Stay warm, dear readers.
The Wall
I thought it ended
and I was headed up
alongside the windows,
bulb sprouts and ducks,
reclaiming ponds, pushing back fog.
And then today came,
cold and back-peddling
freezing me in with only memory.
I slept knees up,
feet raised to pelvis,
chest falling restless
into rhythms unbeaten by my heart.
Then, in a dream I remembered
biology class in spring, pasting
families of flora together with their phyla
on a board: an organizing, memorizing tool.
Pressing flowers to paper
they faded in color, went fossil-like.
Scrapped wisps of seasons ago,
dry veined pages of life.
Next came the animal kingdom,
traipsing fields with the boys
where they coaxed bugs into jars
and I netted the wingers for our collection.
All were cotton-balled to death
and then came the hard part--
pinning the moths to the chart.
They were easier than the beetles,
the crunch of the thorax depleting
as our pin passed through,
like a pen without ink, scratching
a final note.
I went wide-eyed when the butterflies
relinquished their wing-beats,
and the old ones, when lifted, fell apart.
And those with pollen in their nose
left powder and hairs in the jar.
But I am not dreaming now
and they tell me a man has been found
within his house, a suicide they think
dead for nearly 70 years.
Three generations, two world wars
and famines ago: Your medic said
your young body was dead,
days crawling in a shell of skin.
And in the end, you alone
decided how you would go.
Cancer inside a wall.
Diseased, ashamed, you left life
leaning on a divining rod.
Note written, breaths taken,
plastering commenced.
Away, you said, you were going away,
setting by ship, a slip of a legend,
a love-designed lie:
to America in this dream-making time
and send word, in health someday.
But how could you, how could you,
create your own coffin,
fall into a wall not yet there,
wait for the insulate mix to set
and harden around your lungs,
packed into a white nothingness
waiting on solidifying cement?
How can the sadness,
eating me like sickness,
with the starvation of a city rat,
overcome someone who knows you?
I think I’ll get up now
and wade through the snow.
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