Ice Age - Feb 4 2021

 

Ice Age

Feb 4 2021

Knee high, and climbing.

The snow was relentless, day after day,

and more than falling, it seemed to fill the air

obscuring the world in a gauzy veil.

On every object

piles of snow preposterously tottered,

until they eventually collapsed

in cascading showers of white,

like tiny grenades

firing randomly off.

Snow swallowed up

all but the tallest things,

which seemed to poke out their noses

straining to breath.

And in the quiet

when it finally stopped

it seemed as if time had paused.

The air was still, the sky leaden,

and a thick blanket of cotton-soft snow

graced the world,

concealing its sins

and neglect

and whatever we'd left

undone.

An unnerving calm

that seemed somehow ominous.

The front door, which swings outward

was blocked.

Inside, it was unnervingly dark,

and a wall of snow

reached halfway up the sliding glass,

spilling onto the floor

as I inched it open.

Was this the start

of a new age of glaciers?

So by spring

the house will have vanished,

entombed in white

and eventually ice

under the snow's implacable weight?

We are at the mercy of nature.

And one day, the snow may not stop,

burying us

like the unwitting inhabitants

of ancient Pompeii.

Not quickly

by scorching fire and poisonous ash,

but slowly

in merciful cold

in dense blocks of ice.

So resigned to fate

rather than caught in the act.

And if not the immortality

we imagined for ourselves

at least untouched by time

for as long as the ice age lasts.

We've had an unusually dry winter. But it finally snowed today, and like a moving target the forecast keeps calling for more.

I recall a winter in the mid 90s when it snowed and snowed, so that a wall of snow was piled up against the sliding doors, it took a front-end loader to clear the driveway, and I had the exhausting job of digging out the house layer by layer and running out of places to put it. I recall thinking that the last ice age might have started this way: a big dump of snow that turned into endless winter, the snow relentlessly deepening until the house was buried and our machines overwhelmed. This image recurred today, and gave rise to this poem.

Out front, I have a bird house that sits high up on stilts. And snow does just that: piles up in a narrow column like a ridiculous white top hat that looks structurally impossible. Until it inevitably topples.

And there often is this uncanny calm after a big storm: sound muffled; the world concealed in a pristine mantle of unbroken white.