Predictions of Winter
Oct 27 2013


In the vestibule
I stamp snow from my boots,
toes dead as blocks of wood
breath still visible.
I stand helpless
in the small unheated room,
frozen fingers too weak
even to grasp
the stiffened laces.
All my concentration
is on the zipper's little tab,
the heels of my hands

grasping numbly;

buttons, impossible.
I feel like the lethal cold
of Jack London's fire,
that final precious match.

The glass door
slapping shut at my back
has instantly bloomed
to a hard white frost.
Only the frozen snot
on my upper lip
is thawing,
dripping salt and mucus
into my mouth.
And I think of oysters
slipping down raw,
an oil-slick sea.

The fist blast of arctic air
had been clear, dry, astringent,
as if the cold
had distilled out all impurity,
as if oxygen thrived
in sub-zero conditions.
I teared up
in the blinding light
between high blue sky
and icy surface.

We tend to remember winter
as a fond abstraction,
an invigorating pause
in the headlong passage of time.
But forget
the frost-bit blisters
and bitter cold.
Fingers and toes
dropping-off,

marrow-deep freeze.

Like icicles
that cling to the gutters
and randomly fall to earth.
If you're lucky

shatter on the concrete walkway,

tinkling like glass
in the cold black stillness
of night.
And if you’re not
catch you unaware
taking the air
below.

I have Reynaud’s syndrome. Even in the relatively mild temperatures of fall, the small arteries of my fingers and toes will spasm; so my fingers become purple and white, stiffen with cold, and can take forever to come back to life. With all the lacing and layering and numbing of extremities, the reality of the impending winter comes back to me.

I was just reading about Jack London, and of course his great story about the freezing man and his last match inevitably comes up. I feel his plight with intense empathy. I think especially about that precious match when I’m standing in the vestibule, fingers too frozen to even exert the pressure I need to grip my bootlaces, waiting out their slow painful thaw.

The poem flirts with death:  the dead toes; final precious match; the oyster eaten alive (yechhh!); the suffering of the penultimate stanza. So I don’t think the lethal icicle comes out of the blue.