December Nightfall by Alexander Volkov
Here's a breathtaking poem by my friend Maryann Corbett:
A Trenta-Sei
of Mixed Feelings at the Early Onset of Winter
with
apologies to the shade of John Ciardi
by Maryann
Corbett
As the first
flakes are caught in streetlight-glimmer,
you gasp:
Lovely! Your gasping throat still raw,
the truth
grips like catarrh: a Midwest winter
beautiful?
Like a left hook to the jaw,
the
knuckled, scraping wait for spring’s mud-brown.
You bend
your mind to months of hunkering down.
You gasp.
Lovely? Your gasping throat still raw,
outward you
bound to boisterous winter sports!
Thrill to
the wind chill! (When will the fingers thaw?)
Joy! when
the frozen stiffs stagger indoors!
(And what in
this routine vaguely recalls
old saws
that feature banging, and heads, and walls?)
The truth
grips like catarrh: a Midwest winter
makes short
work of its fairy tale. Snow-white
soils itself
on plows. Ice-daggers splinter,
murder-minding
the pavement. Ice-dams blight
cold attics.
Traffic slogs and spins awry.
The bus
slings up a wad of slush at an eye.
Unbeautiful.
Like a left hook to the jaw—
except those
fugitive seconds of pure peace:
Silence of
evening shoveling, when you saw
that famous
moonlight. Snow sculpting the trees.
Benches,
fences slathered like wedding cakes.
Streetlights.
Indigo dark, and the clean flakes.
The
knuckled, scraping wait for spring’s mud-brown
craves every
beauty bagged in the tangled mind
for
cold-comfort. Sucks the marrowbone
of song.
Tongues at old poems jarred and brined
like olives.
Hears the orchard, shiver-thinned,
keen to itself:
the sweep of easy wind….
You bend
your mind to months of hunkering down:
You load the
chafing dish. You light the sterno.
You heat the
buttered rum. You cannot drown
your memory
of those stanzas from the Inferno
at the
tale-end of the terza rima spell
where Hell
is cold. Where cold is the heart of Hell.
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