On clarity and cold
certain words prevent me from working
Reading this poem over and over on a bitterly cold day while everything else waits has a kind of justice. It makes me smile.
I’m sitting on the couch in a blanket on Saturday marveling at the wood stove. I managed to get it cranking after only one try. “It’s going to hit a high of only 16 degrees around 3pm and the real feel will be zero,” says my spouse Janyce from the kitchen. We’ve been talking about the weather all morning.
I got up early this morning, with enough time for coffee and to let the car idle, and I still found myself frantic in the driveway, fishing around deep in the well of the trunk with one hand, trying to find some key pieces of my workout clothes. I lost a glove in the process and my fingers were aching after only one minute. It wasn’t any warmer hours later while I was driving back home, zipping along in traffic, every car in front of me blasting out billowy plumes of white exhaust smoke.
A friend of mine way up in Maine near the Canada border wrote on his social feed, “There’s a tiny little piece of me that wants to go outside and see what 48° below zero feels like. The rest of me is perfectly happy to stay indoors till June.” Some other friends who are using our Cape Cod house this weekend texted us a photo of the beach they were walking on. “Beautiful but so effing cold,” they said.
“The crazy thing is, it’s going to be 50 degrees tomorrow,” says Janyce, now standing in front of me with a pile of laundered bed sheets in her arms. We’ve both decided to stay inside and work on this bitter cold day. Work for me is on the computer, mostly. I have homework. Two lessons that involve a lot of reading and thinking. But I’ve been delayed so far today by a beautiful poem — or to be exact, some beautiful words. I looked the words up to read their full meaning and to see why the poet chose them in particular. Fallow. Bluster. Inclement.
Another friend of mine sent me her digital “collage of the day” earlier. “Think of a title,” she said. “Just one word.” I’m grateful for my daily, steady stream of texts from friends. I’m always happy to text back, to stay connected. But I am also highly distracted. I’m distracted all the time lately by digital work, by too many devices and too many demands on my time, by the dog needing to go out. But also—thankfully—by a word like “fallow.”
One aspect of this tiny, cinematic poem called “Inclement” by Allison Titus is a reminder to remain unproductive sometimes, to lie fallow long enough to notice an “asymmetry of wind.” Reading the poem over and over on a bitterly cold day while everything else waits has a kind of justice. It makes me smile.
I took a photo last week of a single abandoned bird nest in a large thicket at the edge of water. I planned to use this photo in a blog post at some point and now it makes perfect sense to me, thanks to Allison’s goats and fields. “A slumber of muscle and grass is still a different elegy,” she says. That’s what I was noticing last week. That’s it exactly. A slumber of grass.
Inclement BY ALLISON TITUS Snow and after, each bidding and restlessness turns the goat’s heart fallow: long hours of ice and bluster: asymmetry of wind. Say every goat has in its heart a field, and each field, a goat: the slumber of muscle and grass is still a different elegy. Every heart writes a different letter of winter to its cold. Icicles on sheet metal, bucket frozen in the well. Once there was no language for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless; or The sky is a box of wings.