March
Mar 11 2009


Baseball started
somewhere south of here.

Today, a foot of snow fell,
wind blasted,
the mercury froze.
And now, it’s still,
the sky blue
the surface blinding
sculpted smooth.
Later, a full moon will cast its shadow,
causing shapes to shift
objects vanish.
When I will walk
in my white pneumatic suit,
lost
in the beauty of snow.

On the radio
the boys of summer play —
emerald fields
sun-drenched fans
the crack of bats.
I listen
to this improbable sound,
as inaccessible as
Antarctica
Saturn's moons
the black abysmal depths.

Restless for spring;
yet hoping March
will never end.



I wanted to write about the mercurial nature of March: how it’s the most unpredictable month; how the weather can change in an instant; how it whip-saws you from winter to summer, then back again. But I can’t just come out and say that; which would, after all, violate the cardinal rule of poetry: "don't say it, show it." (No, that would be far too easy; not to mention that it would make the opening sentence of this little paragraph a perfectly adequate – if unmemorable – poem!) The solution turned out to be pretty easy: there was a wild winter storm today, and the World Baseball Classic has already begun. I think -- if anything in this poem works, that is -- it's the ambivalence at the end that nails it.

Another impulse was this inexplicable image I had of trekking across the white borderless expanse of Antarctica. For some reason, I was particularly attracted to the idea of the utterly sterile odourless quality of the air there. Unfortunately, there was no way to fit this in!