The Things We’ve Lost in the Snow

March 14 2014

The things we’ve lost in the snow.

The spare glasses, from your back pocket,

now vacantly watching

in absolute dark.

I know how careful you are,

how the scratched lens

would upset you.

How essential they are

to your view of the world,

sharply etched

and unequivocal.

The keys I dropped

on my way to the car

fingers stiff with cold.

When all I want

is to go as far as possible.

How something dense, like that

will vanish;

as seamless as water

straight to the bottom

all the way down,

its smooth white surface

undisturbed.

Like her inscrutable face

turning away,

eyes empty

mouth set.

All the dog turds, freeze-drying.

The orphaned mitt,

I gave up trying

to find.

The footprints, that circled blindly

and unaccountably stopped.

Until the leveling wind,

another blizzard

filled them in.

Sanitized

just as history does the past;

written

by the winners

as it usually is.

It will all emerge in spring.

Like a prisoner, from quarantine,

blinking

in unaccustomed sun.

Footprints, even;

because packed snow

is slow to thaw,

the ghosts of where we walked

glistening wetly.

Side-by-side

or single-file

or heading-off our separate ways.

Lost, and found

and lost again.

I've written this poem a few times before: the idea of tell-tale footprints in the snow; the way an object can vanish without a trace in snow, or water; this metaphor for separation and romantic disillusion. I just hope that each time I have a go at it, I improve. And, after all, you can't really plagiarize yourself!

Not that I intended to have another go at something. It was more the first line materializing, and feeling compelled to run with it. Perhaps the idea came from an article about Lydia Davis, whose writing is a cross between prose poetry and flash fiction: short stories that are as short as a paragraph, and combine the ambiguity, irresolution, and distilled language of poetry with the narrative drive of story-telling. And what could be more distilled and inscrutable than objects lost in the snow? And what could be more challenging than constructing a story by implication; that is, imagining the objects as points and drawing lines to connect them?

Here's an example of her writing:


If you were to look in on us, you would be amazed at the elegance in which we live. You would see us sweep into the driveway in a pale green station wagon, casually pat our thoroughbreds as we entered our restored, pre-revolutionary home with its thick beams and red tiled floors. . . . You would see us during the day with dreamy looks in our eyes writing poetry and little dibs and dabs of nothing, as though we had been born to idleness. Perhaps I would invite you to go sketching and we would take the folding chairs and our pads of sketch paper. Perhaps later we would listen to an opera from where we lounged beside the bright medieval fireplace, our Labradors sleeping at our feet on their deerskin rug. But as dinnertime approached you would notice that we grew nervous. At first it would be hardly perceptible, the smallest haunted look in our eyes, a dark shadow on our faces. You would intercept embarrassed glances. I would blush suddenly and turn pale and when dinner arrived, though the pottery were of the finest quality, hand turned, and the mats from Japan and the napkins from India, the beans would stick in your throat, the carrots would break the tines of your fork and you would recognize the taste of cat. How much more painful is poverty for the caretakers.


And actually, now that I think about, I realize exactly where this poem began. Here's more from the same article (from the March 17 2014 New Yorker, and written by Dana Goodyear). (I included the first paragraph because I have exactly the same problem. Which I guess only someone not prone to writer's-block would regard as problematic!)


It is not only the act of writing that forces Davis to write fiction; reading is a danger, too. “I don’t need to go to other writers to get excited,” she says. “The problem is almost the opposite. Certain kinds of writing will give me too many ideas. I have to keep stopping and reacting.” She recently got a collection of lectures Roland Barthes gave at the Sorbonne. “I found that there were so many interesting ideas in one paragraph that I almost couldn’t read it.”...

...E-mail can be equally threatening. In the office, Davis opened up her account to a folder of messages from the Listserv at Bard College, where she used to teach occasionally and where Cote was on the faculty for three decades. Material, practically ready-made. Here was a message from a woman named Lisa Hedges, wondering if anyone had seen her glasses. “I loved her name,” Davis said. “This is what it started as: ‘Round, faux tortoiseshell glasses, bifocal lenses, lost sometime Friday, between the Nursery School, B Village, A Sacred Space. It would be great if somebody has found them and they aren’t in a place covered in a foot of snow!’ ”

What it became:

Personal Announcement
Woman named Shrubbs
Has lost faux tortoiseshell eyeglasses

Where?
Somewhere between nursery school
and sacred space

They are possibly
covered by snow.

I can't explain the radical change of voice in the 4th stanza. It's all you, we, I; then suddenly, and in only this line, it becomes "...Like her pale face ...". It just sounds right. Perhaps it's the sense of distance, of alienation, this conveys. Perhaps it's because this is more an interior thought, a rumination; as opposed to the rest of the poem, which is more a one-sided conversation with this hypothetical "you".