The Secret Garden of Winter

Feb 23 2019

I am storm-stayed.

The small car

bottoming-out in the drifts,

snow, white-out thick

billowing down.

The generator cranks and fires, clatters and grinds

as if purpose-built for sound.

Its white noise is irregular,

and each small waver 
insistently tugs at my ear.

Has it always stuttered and surged like this,

the dim light

flickered like a sputtering flame?

Wondering if and when

my power will fail.

How the threat of absence

transforms the taken-for-granted

into something of worth.

How we treasure rarity,

so the more uncommon a thing

the more we desire it.

And how contingency

makes us so much more aware

of loss;

from equivocal health

to conditional love.

To be snow-stayed

is the secret garden of winter,

a walled refuge of simple delights

in which one is given permission

to over-eat and over-sleep

and lose track of time.

To let the mind wander,

the burden of agency lifted

and mercifully free of guilt.

This is the paradox of constraint;

that the less choice we have

the happier we find ourselves,

the less freedom we're given

the more imagination has rein.

Like the prescribed lines of the sonnet

or the limits of working in rhyme.

Like strictly rationed electric

or the strictures of natural law.

Where freezing cold

and impassable roads

and a house enclosed in darkness

limit my options to this   —

the housebound dogs asleep

the blinking clock unset,

a ballpoint pen on paper

my small and cluttered desk.

Where the world has contracted

to this pool of yellow light

and I retreat inside my head,

time vanishing

the garden breaching its walls.

Just the sound of the wind

beating hard against the house,

and the warm glow of the fire

to ease my weary bones.

Rest

Feb 19 2019

Let the words rest,

the ear, refresh itself.

Like grilled meat, left to cool;

its flavour melding

its slowly yielding flesh.

The mouth-feel of words.

Like a palate cleanser

between entree and dessert.

And the receptive ear

that, in its absence

confabulates sound;

as a prisoner hungers, who is only fed

warm tap-water

a crust of bread.

Ink flows

on plain white paper

in smoothly cursive curves,

in marginalia

and palimpsest

and scrawled cramped inserts.

Liquid, almost frictionless

the script remains in flux;

never truly done,

and offered up to the world

to take as it will.

So I learn by heart

and give it voice.

Words

that break the heavy silence

that has settled in this space,

the stagnant air

we share with every breath.

Like the comforting aroma

of a home-cooked meal

when you first come through the door,

and how soon you stop noticing

in the kitchen's steamy warmth.

Words

left hovering

in insubstantial air,

as sound decays

and resonates

and I listen once again.

The voice inside my head

as no one else can hear it.

The morsels of words

on my forceful tongue

and soft expressive lips.

A taste, a course, a feast,

an ascetic's meagre crumb.

The Man in the Iron Lung

Feb 14 2019

More and more often, I feel

I'm the man in the iron lung.

Enclosed

from the neck up

in this barrel-shaped vault;

a centaur-like creature

who is mostly machine

with a body of tubular steel.

Where the wheezing in-and-out

of its life-giving pump

has become so regular

I only hear it when it fails.

And where compressed air

weighs down on my chest

for 20 hours a day;

my vital source of breath

that could suffocate, just as well.

It's disconcerting

how a body too infirm to move

can experience such exquisite sensation;

on my bird-like ribs

and legs like stilts

and the virgin soles of my feet,

the private parts

I cannot even see.

How a body desires

but ends up consigned

to a prison it has made of itself.

An act of God?

Or the negligence of my younger self

who let a virus enter?

Who walled-off the world,

evicting himself

from all its earthly pleasures.

Its highs, as well as its lows,

its joys

and accompanying sorrows.

Only my head sits free

of this big metal tank

in a room I know by heart.

Where I watch

as if from behind unbreakable glass;

my heavy extremities

the itch I cannot scratch,

the unquenchable heat

I feel ashamed to ask.

It seems like an artifact

of the early days of medicine,

a loud clumsy machine

of heavy welded steel.

Iron horse, iron lung, iron man.

From before we had conquered nature

      . . . or at least, thought we had.

But nature persists in us all,

and who we are

is inviolable.

Like the will to survive.

Like the urgent drive

to take another breath.

Like the small contorted homunculus

who lives deep down inside

and never lets you forget.

I just watched a brilliant touching movie called The Sessions, starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, and William H. Macey. It's the story of a man who contracted polio as a child and is confined to an iron lung.

He lives in his head. He is a poet. He is a sweet and funny man, who appears to have conquered bitterness and resentment. But he is a devout Catholic, carries baggage from his past family life, and struggles with guilt, shame, and recrimination. He yearns to live fully, and feels unrequited desire: for physical touch ...for sex ...for love.

Anyway, as I watched, I felt like I was the man in the iron lung; if an iron lung of my own making. After sleeping on it for a night, this poem came to me, and pretty much wrote itself. If my poetry tends to be bloodless and wary of the confessional, then this may be one of the rare exceptions.

Near Earth Orbit

Feb 13 2019

Astronauts circle the earth

400 km up.

At a sensible speed

a 4 hour trip

that would take me just south of Duluth.

Where the northern plains are flat,

and farmer's fields

parcel-out the land

like an heirloom quilt.

Just a short jaunt

and you could kick-back in weightless free-fall.

How at so short a distance

this massive planet

might just as well have vanished,

its gravity as weak

as the attraction between small everyday objects;

this ottoman and chair, resting quietly,

human bodies

like yours and mine

who feel more push than pull.

Just an afternoon drive.

To where astronauts effortlessly float,

turning somersaults

on steadily softening bones.

And where spilled water

forms large erratic drops

wobbling freely through the air.

High enough

to barely skirt the atmosphere

that blankets planet earth.

That warm and wet

cauldron of weather

that protects us from outer space,

turning the sky

from cold black void

to softly luminous blue.

Imagine

a single layer of plastic wrap

around a standard basketball

and you will understand its frailty.

Thinner, even, than gravity;

but neither as inviolable as physical law

nor nearly as constant.

The air we share

with every living thing

in the entire known universe,

breathing in

as they breathe out.

And the only place

where the most complicated object ever devised

by man or god

is at home,

calculating trajectories

calibrating oxygen

contemplating purpose.

The human brain,

utterly dependent

on mother earth.

Our envoy to the cosmos

is a cramped ship filled with stale air

in near earth orbit.

Close up

it looks like a stick insect

in luminous white;

solar collectors, like random appendages,

modules bolted together

as if improvised.

While from down here

on this endless stretch of asphalt

between tall rows of corn

it's a bright light in the night sky,

moving steadily against

the background of stars.

So close

it has barely left the surface;

astronauts, looking down on planet earth

as it advances beneath them

like a vast unfolding scroll

in brilliant blues and greens.

And so far

all an astronaut can see

is a deep dark void,

looking out

on the utter blackness

of outer space.

Astronauts return from space transformed, full of wonder and awe. We talk about outer space, the exhilaration of weightlessness, the challenge of life support. Yet the international space station is only 400 km up, the equivalent of an afternoon drive. So near earth orbit is hardly “outer” space.

Our furthest frontier is so close to home; yet despite the proximity of this outpost of humanity, it still takes all of our technological expertise and ingenuity to sustain life there. Which shows just how tethered we are to mother earth. And also gives us a perspective on earth's own fragility: the thinness of its life-giving atmosphere; its smallness and singular place in a vast indifferent universe that's cold and dark and timeless.

So the paradox of near earth orbit is that it's both close and far. I've visited this paradox in previous poems, but wanted another go at it. My starting point was the weakness of gravity: how it seems so powerful, here on the surface, where it effectively rules our lives; yet how it also so quickly peters out.

Close and far, strong and weak. How physics is often counter-intuitive; how common sense may be common, but isn't always either sensible or true.

Digging Out

Feb 8 2019

The smooth surface

of virgin snow

has been wind-blown into long rolling waves.

And in the incandescent light

as night slowly falls

glows a softly luminous orange

as if warmed from within.

The path from the back door

has become an escape hatch

through impassable drifts,

exactly one shovel-width wide

and now higher than my shoulders.

Where I stoop to dig,

the steady rhythmic motion

of a long practised chore.

Each snowfall, I have cleared this path

as if staking out my own small tract

from winter's vast dynasty,
skirting the house 
from front to back.

Until it has become a sheltered tunnel

between white vertical walls

that, like geological strata

ascend through time.

So from old compressed snow

to freshly fallen flakes

I can read its sedimentary layers;

a section of ice

from that near-thaw and freezing rain,

a carboniferous line

from the bad firewood

that sputtered greasy black smoke.

Down here, the wind does not penetrate.

And in the warm flush of exertion

I pause

to survey my work.

The virtuous glow

of manual labour;

the satisfaction

of something you can measure and touch

of a tangible end

of having done.

And feel as if time is on hold

as I gaze out on the accumulation of snow

from the last 3 months;

the world suspended

the season frozen in place.

Storm-stayed, and in no rush.

Because in winter

we have permission to slow

or pause

or even stop,

and often have no choice.

As I lean on the shovel

mind adrift, body at rest

chin on hands

and hands crossed.

Night settles-in,

and with the absence of motion, the lights click-off.

Only the sound of the wind

my regular breathing

and the last of the snow,

falling softly

in the heavy dark.

Torched

Feb 1 2019

The steel rails froze,

and the big locomotive

   –   diesel throbbing

steam boiling from its black exhaust   –

was stopped stock-still;

like an ambush predator

taking slow deep breaths

its power barely contained.

A cold snap, we say;

as brittle as the temperature,

as brief

as a single sharp clap.

But the deep freeze

was here to stay

and we all hunkered down indoors.

So cold

rail switches had frozen shut, steel rails shrunk.

So they set the tracks on fire;

the stink of kerosene,

flames licking at blackened wheels,

and warm refracting air

shimmering above them.

The Windy City, Second City, City of Big Shoulders.

Second only to New York

   —  which doesn't burn, but smoulders

like a sultry ingenue.

Unlike Chicago,

where fire and ice

cancel out

and no one gets too hot or cold.

Not in the mid-west

on the shores of a great lake

where heavily built men

and their big-boned wives

refuse to put on airs,

two-handed eaters

of Malnati's deep-dish pie

Portillo's Italian beef.

I saw the ground ablaze

as if the end of times had come.

And thought hell must look like this,

a glowing bed of flames

engulfing the world.

A premonition

of the apocalypse.

Desperate measures

in the war on nature

we will never win.

Because our cities cannot bear this cold,

as houses crack

rails heave

a hulking diesel stands,

the pent-up strength

of 3,000 horses

strain against their reins.