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.