Short and Fast

Feb 13 2013


The mid-February thaw
came as expected.
I find myself over-dressed
and oddly restless,
under leaden skies
a steady drip
of chilly mist.
Snow, heavy and wet
I could wring-out
like a sponge,
brown earth
where the road's churned up.
I inhale breath after breath
of that loamy scent
for the first time since fall.

How quickly
I miss the cold;
when the light was clear,
and a frozen world
held reassuringly still.

And how quick winter's over
the older I get.
The succession of seasons
speeding up,
just as year after year
blur into each other.
My memory

is equally muddled.

If not lost
then re-invented,

blended, compressed
like softening snow,

confused, and conflated.
As if I could resurrect the past,
or even trust
my recollection.

When it freezes again
the snow will be crusted
hard.
The ruts where my car
slogged through the slush,
jagged geologic formations.
And clumpy boots
caught, like some fossilized beast
in tidal flat, or dried-up creek,
too big for human feet.

March, with its whiff of spring
lies just over the horizon.
The month of lions, and lambs,
who will lie down, unscathed

in some Messianic age.
In the fullness of time,
when I need no longer
keep track,
not bother looking back.

Today, there are only mice.
Who live in the present
in a buried bed
of matted grass.
Tiny rodents
whose clever homes
underneath the snow
have collapsed.

In unseasonable weather
frozen fast.

 This poem is a rather melancholy rumination on time. I think most of us are inclined to think this way at the change of season. And also to think this way at the realization how much faster time goes the older we get.

(Of course, early February is hardly the change of season:  more like false hope, for those not so well disposed toward winter; and a blessedly brief respite for the small minority of us who are.)

The piece moves back and forth, from past to future; then ultimately settles into the present. And with the inexorable inevitability of death, I suppose exhorts us to revel in the here-and-now, rather than ruminate and remonstrate with what cannot be changed. I think this theme of fatalistic acceptance is reinforced by the contrasting metaphors:  the permanence of geologic formation and the fossil record, preserved in stone; as opposed to the recurring imagery of animals, of mortal flesh. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine that the author identifies with the field mice, who are early casualties of the exaggerated freeze/thaw cycle that threatens to become a permanent consequence of climate change.

The meditation on memory is quite apt. Because the latest neuroscience tells us that memory is highly malleable:  that a memory is not a photograph filed away in some neuron, but rather is re-made each time it’s recalled. Hence, the “re-invention”.