In Cold Words

various scenes of the middle

1.
What would I persist in thinking
if I went out
on a cold winter's night?

There is a reaching wind that blows the winter cold,

it's icy precipitation slicing
over our prairie landscapes
cutting the stalks as they stand in place.

The cold slices to my feet.

I should have worn more than
slippers.

2.
Creeley wrote about poems, that they are:
“a made thing, a construct, a literal system of words.”
The shamans with the pulsing literal words of our culture,
they are keys to the kingdom they make on this blue earth.

Or
are they pieces of a drunken cemetery
pushing us towards the rushing river of deity
and immortality?

3.
I once stood in place (with more than slippers on) against a cinder block wall.
It was in a gymnasium in Racine, and the winter dance
was being held at the school. I was
searching for a patriot's courage
to ask the cutest girl to dance with me. I was
stuck to the wall and Sue was laughing with others.
My stuckness was a made thing. A construct.
I was a foal, wobbly on new-born legs.

4.
Why should we persist in thinking?
Crawling on our bellies like some lizard
escaping Darwin's evolution
as he walks from the pond
rising upright on legs with knees facing the wrong way,
it's because
that thing which rose
needs to think

1
about the literal words it will use.

5.
Let us come back, to participate in the eternal return,
on a cold winter night
in our slippers
and a cup of cocoa
before a fire warming the house.

The time remaining is narrow

though eternity is forever.
Sometimes you need to be out in the cold
to see the remaining time, to see how
Thoreau wrote, "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation …
they go to the graves with the song still in them."

The graveside lament is for our culture, then,

as we stamp our feet to keep warm
in the snow.

Somewhere, I have sung in other places,

perhaps
off-key.

6.
The next day and
The sun has started to show through the cloudscapes
remaining from the previous night.
The sun has started to show the drifts
piled high from the previous night's wind.

The cold
sloughing off of white purity,
waves of frozen seas
on the narrow landscape facing us,
footpaths plunge through the middle, showing
the way past
emerald evergreens laden with winter's best show
for the soon to be new-born world.

Picking up a plant stalk, I shake off the snow, before tossing it aside.
And a word comes to me as I stamp my feet
which are attached to legs no longer new.
When I return home I will be required to sing this new word.

© The Jotter, 2011