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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment