Oh man it's cold. I wish I could remember days above 0 degrees. I've taken a few photos of the weather on my phone this week when the windchill is at -27, or last night, -18. I like the sounds of the 12 degree high tomorrow. Despite the chill, there's been a bit of laughter as my housemates and I arrive home declaring our immediate need for frost bite treatment (usually just on the few inches of face that can't be covered) or our dislike of the ultra-dry crunching sound each step makes. Or the cuts below our knuckles from the dry skin separating. Or the de-icing of car windshields and filling our gas tanks. Or last night as I left class, when a drop of water from my water bottle dripped onto the ends of my hair. Once outside, my chin pressed into my scarf, the chunk of hair had frozen. The late-night gym visits I've been taking with a friend have since ceased as the walk there is just too far. It's days like these that I vow to never spend another winter in this climate. And then, life brings me back. It all could be far worse. Until then, I think we'll stay inside.
I have many poems and short stories on my wall above my desk, each a favorite for different reasons. Most have been gathered in creative writing classes and have been chosen because they provide scenes, life and words that are too beautiful not to see each day. Some apply to my life, like E. B. White's Once More to the Lake which begins:
"One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us there for the month of August."
This line reminds me of childhood summers, of laughing with my brother on the shores of lakes that are now nameless. Of jumping off docks and swimming in places I can't remember. Somewhere above my desk too is Jane Kenyon's Three Songs at the End of Summer. The second stanza is my favorite, evoking a natural summer beauty scene mixed with a possible biblical reference:
'Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.'
One of my favorites though, is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Wild Dreams of a New Beginning. It's challenging to explain everything I see in it. It's a mixture of a failed American dream, a recognition of religion, history, of our own successes failing, our failures succeeding, living as a shared people yet fiercely independent through choice. It's distress, tragedy and our shared existence. It's almost Americana with an emphasis on fragility, how meaningless we all are. I have so many select lines I like, but they wouldn't be worthy without the full poem:
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking place in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded and swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
and bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a roller coaster
Skyscrapers filled with like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhattan Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
manhattan streaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
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