Unseasonable
Dec 10 2013


In the cold snap
the sound of ice
tightening its grip.
Sharp resounding cracks
wrack the frozen lake,
the immense weight
of its congealed surface
settling, flexing
testing its strength,
compressing
its inelastic container.
Everything turns brittle,
as plastic shatters
and even metal
seems fallible.
What a mercy to die
in this frozen Valhalla,
sink
into painless sleep.

In the heat wave
land shimmers,
baking air
bending light.
The sun
sweeps directly overhead,
where it hovers, but doesn’t break;
the thermometer, peaking,
by evening
barely falls.
Heat
pouring down
on the ocean of air;
so thin, I feel I might drown
gasping for breath.

In December
it's never this cold.
And Summer will come too soon,
the succulent greens
and luminous blooms
snuffed-out by heat,
parched
in nascent Spring.

So by Fall
the whimpering end,
stunted leaves
and withered fields
in a brown and barren earth.

It's unseasonably cold for early December. Especially since the grim reality of climate change has led me to expect warmer wetter winters. So I thought I would try to write something about extreme cold.

"Cold snap" quickly came to mind, and I soon found myself wondering about its opposite, the "heat wave". And the metaphors indeed seem to work: this is very much how the highs of summer and lows of winter seem to materialize. So the imagery of the poem is an attempt to make these metaphors concrete: the brittle cold, the crack of ice; and then a watery theme, with its super-heated ocean of air, relentless waves of heat.

Which -- in the spirit of completeness --led me to spring and fall, where I again play around with literalisms: in which the turgor of spring's early shoots turns flaccid; and in which fall becomes an actual denouement, a morality tale of a warming planet and a Biblical fall. The capitals were intended to reinforce the misdirection: to emphasize the formal name, before the proper noun is transformed into its utilitarian verb.

The first 2 stanzas are descriptive, detached. But they both end on a more personal and emotional note. And end, respectively, in death and drowning; a morbid foreshadowing that keeps the poem coherent, and helps the final ending make sense.

I'm not sure if I should preen over, or apologize for, the clever (shameless?) rhyme of "fallible" and "Valhalla". (Not an exact rhyme, to be sure. I think this is what's called a "sideways" rhyme.) All I can say is I'm endlessly grateful for the many unexpected gifts of the English language, for which I take neither credit nor blame!