Snow Is General

 

Yes, the newspapers were right:  snow was general all over Ireland.

            --James Joyce, "The Dead"

 

 

I don't need a newspaper or web-page radar map

to know what lifting my shade can tell me

this muffled morning, the streets erased overnight,

with phone poles and Stop signs rising from

the general blur like fence posts in a flood,

and it is a flood, this roil of cloudy expanse

that has closed middle schools, shut down interstates,

and already spread across the map in my mind,

every rest stop, back yard and bean field from here

to Albany, New York, falling on Pizza Huts

in Cleveland, wiping out the parking lot

of a hospital in Erie, covering ice shanties

on Lake Onondaga, drifting doors shut

in a trailer park near Binghamton where

my old friend Juan lives, rising bleary-eyed

from frantic dreams and one too many bourbons

last night to peek out the little porthole-sized window

and watch snow still falling, falling across

triumph and loss equally, falling without fuss

as it did thirty-five years ago high

above the river in New Hampshire, where

we stole dinner trays from the dining hall

and headed out to the golf course at midnight

in the swirl and gust of it, the same storm

truly, as falls down the years now, burying

all the hard words, all the frigid miles

that separated us for good half a lifetime ago,

Juan and I, who once every winter at least

will still go careening wildly down

the long sloping fairway of the fourth hole,

shouting shit to the sky and to each other,

both of us well out of control and spinning

deliriously as the flakes spin and descend

out of the darkness, healing every pothole,

every divot and boot print that defaces

the clean lawn down which we plunge,

with no other thought but the glad tug

of gravity, and no other sound but

our sheer, impossible laughter. 

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Thanksgiving Snow

 

 

It's like living with ghosts, Mary says,

her parents walking and talking with her daily.

Lee says I think of Jeannie all the time

--our newest ghost this Thanksgiving.

 

This is what old friends do for holiday:

sip wine and add up the losses,

grow still as evening chills and deepens.

I don't remember my parents, when they were

 

our age, says Mary, complaining this much.

Lee says Maybe they simply didn't let us

hear it.  A new bottle of Merlot to that.

Billie Holiday's voice rising as ours fall.

 

We've been friends half a lifetime.

And this is a life:  dog snoring on the carpet,

art on every wall, candles guttering--

but we've got more, as we've got more to say,

 

though not tonight, slowed with good bread

and soup, getting tired, no alarm clock

in the morning, no journey to embark on,

no appointment or ceremony beyond

 

the slow feast we'll make of the whole

blessed day.  Colder by morning, a few

snowflakes drifting, not like ghosts, not like

words freed from meaning.  Just flakes in the air.

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Exposure 

 

 

Frosting on my moustache,

my coat collar, signifies the usual yes: 

I want to live.  As did the woman

 

who froze to death a half mile from here. 

Birthday-drunk, running out of friends

sooner than the money she splashed

 

over bar and pool table.  The bartender

phoned the cops--we’re no  taxi service--

so she set out into midnight, lay down

 

behind a sidewalk snowbank, curled fetal,

and turned slowly as we can imagine to ice. 

So many tributaries flow into the river

 

of failure, you could spend your life listing. 

But we have lives and she doesn’t,

this woman now frozen in headline,

 

who gulped all the folly that foams up

in a beer mug, who by spring thaw

will be fully earth, a story we’ll each tell

 

for our own reasons, hers having vanished

like dusting snow that blanketed her that night. 

Yes, we’re mainly water, but the mind

 

is two thirds stubbornness, half hopeful

and bird-skittery, one quarter

sheer cloudy ignorance--finally the numbers

 

won’t add up.  Lawyers take pains to avoid

exposure, which is what happens

when you head into zero without a plan. 

 

But who is not wholly exposed to cold air? 

We enter it and it enters us.  We’re not

our sister’s keepers nor any midnight taxicab,

 

exposed to nothing worse than this

ponderous cloud of unseeing.  Like all bodies

of water, she expanded when she froze,

 

casting big shadows on patrol car, darkened window,

small town bar.  I’d like to recount some dreams

she had while juices of soul and gut still gurgled,

 

when lungs and brain sparked with current--

but it’s all obvious stuff, white sand beaches

at August noon, or snowbanks like bathsuds swirling

 

warmly between her knees.  Maybe I could conjure

the serene glance of a Holstein dead thirty years,

possibly lilacs swaying heavily on a branch. 

 

But I’m helpless to thicken her thin blood

with anything more than a moonstruck

sidewalk raked by all the shopworn stars.

 

And cannot fairly guess what she saw as she sank

into the material world.  There probably was reason

she got sloshed alone, had nobody

 

to fetch her home on a thirty-below night. 

Same night I went walking my dog for the cutting

thrill of it:  moonglow on darkened houses,

 

shadows soft as fur spread across obliterating drifts. 

A turn or two differently taken, I would have found her.

But I did not give a flicker of a thought

 

how easy it would be just to lie down and cease,

the slow snowfall thickening

as night deepened to its own devices.  

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Slush

 

 

As a special effect it's most unperfect:   first snow

heavy as legislation on windshields everywhere,

soaking my sneakers as I trudge the steps to work.

It's not the snow I ordered, not romantic, dramatic,

rhetorical, transcendent, exclamatory, predictive snow;

it's not looming, dour, frisky, able-bodied, sensitive,

multilingual, harsh, carnal, lonesome or beauteous snow;

it's just rug heavy and sopping.  It's bubblegum

hardening under a chair.  Hairy drain-clog.  I feel its bruised

leg over mine--oh no!--this snow has designs on me!

 

Who's to say what will happen to us tomorrow,

the gray-faced snow and me, here all quilty

in our self regard and myopia, here so self-obsessed

like a finch at the feeder?  Am I dire cold?  Check.

Diffuse as childhood?  Check.  Sloppy-tongued

and random in my unwelcome lust?  Check.  Check.

And does the snow harbor, like me, an address book

mad with erasures?  You bet.  Ya sure.  That's affirmative.

 

So I sled across the morning's dwindling minutes

with a look on my face, with carrot fingers

and last season's socks, and I'm entirely sure

a glossy crow must flash from my heart

across the plentiful avenues, the copious lawns,

while radios pump out the top hits of 1794,

but it's all just misdirection, it's sizzle and smoky mirrors,

for I am sunk in the slush of myself as per usual, and not

even an African drum solo or the echo of a popping cork

can lift this flannel sky again once it's fallen.  

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Angels from the Realms of Glory

 

 

Christmas day.  My father dozes through carol sing.

One ancient pianist sight-reads half the hymnal

while a handful of off-key, cracked voices labor through

O Come All Ye Faithful, but Dad is one of the vacant now,

a drooler with cookie crumbs on his sweater.

 

He didn't even open his eyes for breakfast--yogurt

spooned to his mouth like babyfood.  Now he sleeps

through Silent Night and Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,

propped up in his wheelchair in a circle of the lame,

the blind, the cloud-headed.  No longer able to hold a book

or button his shirt.  His hands that steadied my two-wheeler

and pushed me down the sidewalk into this future

are now claws, clenched around washcloths

so as not to freeze that way.   Why not?  I wonder.

 

I hum along to Angels from the Realms of Glory,

our favorite, Dad at my side in the pew at St. John's,

eyes closing on the high notes, belting out the Gloria

in his small town baritone, Dad at my side now asleep

through verse and chorus, through diagnosis and silence,

through V-J Day and the moon landing, dozing

through the Annunciation and his own wartime wedding.

 

Dad sleeping or at least keeping eyes carefully shut

through the Black Death and Crusades, his first wet dream,

the pneumonia that almost killed me in 1953,

his own father with stroke-crippled face in 1960,

a nest of yellowjackets he stepped into in the wilds

of Maine in 1950.  Dad still knows me, I think,

but has misplaced the details, like my name and age,

and he's just going to keep his eyes shut a while longer,

until things clear up in his mind, until he can rise

from this chair and reach for wallet and car keys.

 

He's going to sleep until the Industrial Revolution,

the Great Depression, and the Cold War are over

at last, and he can swoop down the slope

on four inches of fresh powder, whistling

Joy to the World as he glides between holiday pines.

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A Mind Of Winter

 

 

I recognize the pose:  casual cool,

one arm spread along the top slat

of the bench, legs wide in disdain,

a gaze aiming at unreadable.

For two days he's sprawled at ease

near the student union, making it clear

he's not moving come class or final.

The season's second snowfall

glazes his face and limbs.

The fact that he's sculpted in snow

explains much of his immobility

but not all.  For he's so much the ghost

of the unlistener, that back-row child

who passes through wisdom

as through the weather, elemental

and unaltered, that I know

I've seen him sprawled over half

my life.  Not to mention that

I've been that boy, chilling myself

from inside out with the ice

of unknowing.  So I cannot pass

without a kind thought tossed

like a whiff of cool wind

in his direction.  His eyeless gaze

cannot blink away new snow

building, nor can my squint

focus his form.  By tomorrow

both our heads will have been

knocked off and reasserted

more times than we can tell.

 

(from Stutter Monk.  Flume Press, 2000)

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© David Graham