Whew. I wrote this one quickly (though in pieces) which is the entire point of Drift(s). The first stanzas, in upstate New York a few months ago while trapped in a wild snowstorm. I was walking in the glorious aftereffects and the lines below sprang forth. I jotted them down as soon as I got back to the room and didn’t think about them again, until this morning, when I awoke in the mountains of West Virginia to a dusting of snow. I arrived only a day before and it was 80 degrees! Thus far, every conversation had today involved some lamentation of spring’s unpredictable nature. So I returned to these snowy stanzas and instead constructed a poem about precipice, about spring.
This new series is actually quite difficult for me. I usually hoard and edit poems for months, if not years, before publishing or submitting. I never find them “ready,” mostly because I don’t have an editor and live with a deep writing insecurity. I’m trying to discern if this new initiative is a good one or not, since I’m publishing something so off the cuff, so unedited, and for what? That insecure parcel of me wants to make it clear that this is not a published, polished poem of mine! This is only a creative exercise, a quick moment I hope you find meaning or pleasure within, maybe some linguistic inspiration. Its greater purpose, I believe, is the insistence to let go.
And just in case you missed Drift 1 (click).
SPRING
Snow’s not falling but enclosing,
pocketing even sound with it. Indeed,
all that’s left now is exhalation, muffled
ticks of moan toward earth, hushed. Somewhere underneath all this crystalline matter, both dense and godly, something is suffocating. Or is it just resting under weighted respite? We won’t find out today, won’t attempt to lift sky’s cover. The only marring we will do is in shallow relief, trinkets of a lumbered, fat feet. We won’t resist element, for tomorrow will still be glorious, blanched in aftereffect, drenched in solar flame. We won’t think too much about the day after, forebodings of singed ruin and melted idea, an oiled tar we will brush up in heaping peak— we won’t think too deeply of this shallow proof of depravity. We won’t even notice the small pink bud hugging body, primed for unfastening, swaying wild but refusing to unhinge. Must be a new arrival, born of lengthy gestation only days before, one of those tiny seeds that can unfurl an entire season.
The dusting: