Thursday, February 28, 2019



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.


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