Late Snow
Nov 7 2014


A tulip
in early bloom
in freshly fallen snow,
translucent white, from melt.

Looks luscious, in April light,
defiant, erect
in vivid green, and fuchsia red.
Makes you feel like the sightless man
with a vague recollection of grey,
struck by colour
too dazzling to comprehend.

It might survive
a light frost.
Or have come too soon, and die,
lying flat, in damp brown grass
colour drained.

Like all the visionaries, who were scorned in their day,
unremembered, unlamented
in the riot of spring's excess.


A nice bookend to my previous poem, First Snow. Although it didn't come about that way.

The vision of intense arresting colour actually came from a quick cut in the opening sequence of HBOs latest mini-series Olive Kitteridge. This complicated woman is repelling, fascinating, and yet deeply sympathetic; and the show is a wonderful depiction of nuanced relationship, repression, and subterranean suffering in an unremarkable working-class town in coastal Maine. But that's not what this poem is about. It's simply about this image, which jumped out of the screen and seared itself into my retina, calling out for a short sharp homage. (Although I think the garden is important in the show, and not simply incidental: something she can care for; a way to show her love undemonstrably, and without the risk of betrayal or disappointment.)

This early tulip was too eager for life, too irrepressible: like the lost visionaries and go-getters and innovators, unceremoniously cut down by a late snow, unremembered and unlamented.

Oliver Sachs wrote about a man who suddenly recovered his sight. He found the newly seen world incomprehensible and overwhelming. I've always remembered this: the gift of sight, but his brain and his spirit had no capacity for it, and vision ended up a terrible burden.

It's also a way to simply say "stop and smell the roses" without resorting to cliché. It reflects my preference for microcosm, close observation, the still life. Which is what poetry is all about: not just looking at the world, but stopping, taking time, seeing it as if newly made.

I always feel I want to write less; that the apotheosis of my work will be a poem of a single word. That was something I set out to do here: write something sharp and short. Not nearly there, of course; but at least closer!