Night Weather, Week 1 of Winter: Solstice and Ice

Cynthia Reeves, “Landscape Study,” late 1950s. The dark day of a winter solstice. 

i.
cold wind
leaf over leaf
will scrape across the snow

*****

In my posts for each of the thirteen weeks of winter, I imagine colder days than we consistently get in my part of North Carolina. But over the years we have experienced winter weather—sleet that knocked out the power for several very cold days, knee-high snow (it usually melted quickly), rivers frozen so hard a few hardy souls dared to step out on the ice. Late fall here has been unusually cold this year, perhaps portending an icy winter. I am writing on Wednesday 18 December. The high today will be 70, but a low of 19 degrees is forecast for Sunday, the planned date for this post. We may remember this as a cold winter.

Most of my memories of cold weather in the South come from two winters. First was the winter of 1959-1960 in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia: unusually heavy snow fell on four consecutive Wednesdays and remained on the ground through an unusually long cold snap; in some places it was blown into drifts over 20 feet high. On our farm in Southwest Virginia, we could walk on the drifts over fences; the tops of the fence posts protruded only an inch or two above the snow. The storms and persistent snow cover caused major disruptions and hardships for many, though not for my family. In remote areas, food was helicoptered in for people and livestock. In North Carolina, children missed so much school, a special act of the legislature was required to allow them to advance to the next grade.

The second landmark winter was January 1994, when an unusual cold snap in the Raleigh-Durham area caused rivers to freeze over. My son and I walked out on ice over shallow spots on the Eno. Falling through would only have wetted our boots, but we didn’t fall through. The ice cracked but did not bend or break.

Eno Winter 1994

i. Feeder creek
above water
stump ends ice-encased
end game

ii. Islets of ice, eyelets of sun
“If she cracks she bears”
coronal splendors teethe the light

avid as tongue for water
the eye creases the ice

nuzzle pivots and frays
the wind: shoots

of man-smell flag the woods
like common grass

rive from river the high-tailed fear
the white-tailed beauty

“if she bends she breaks”
with crack of fire

iii. Great blue
The heron bides on one leg stumped
the kingfisher's harangue. Exiled inland
these solitary birds shy as bats

beat their wings like dirty rugs.
Trapped by winter they stoicize:
can freeze upright and fall with a clatter.

Mired in the Eno, their bodies are baled
with log and leaf, bottle, carcass of tire
foul and indispensable.

iv. The air this side
Brazen airings attack
us napped and felted inside-
outed by bluer breathings

They cap the riffles with foam
pour unvoiced over the river
the mercies of God

Shuttle steaming from lights
to heart, bolted to iron
swimming in us as we in them

Fluvial days, rivers
of exhalation: the noon light shivers
shivers and drowns the trees.

v. The bluer book
What matters cannot be said: in this field
of vision that obtuse angle of ridge and river
form of air and light, it is what you see
you cannot say, for you see nothing:

the opposite ridge sheared (like this) of woods,
the ice-mottled brush-lined river, the arc
of power lines carving the space:  these--
palpable and opaque—permit the void

to fill the eye. Moved inwardly by that glow,
we speak—must speak—though what we say, whatever
we can say, does not matter.  What it means, if it
means anything, is beyond our saying.

vi. Are these
The green pastures promised the righteous? The grass
is all browns, yellows, and grays, like a barbershop’s
day’s end sweepings. Where are the hoppers, the fiddlers,
the leg-scraping white-winged shit-spitters?

Like the rich, they are different: wear
their bones outside, breathe from the gut, sing
all summer long. Come back in July, climb
the high grassed hill before the power company

bushhogs it back to lawn, and they will rise
before you clickety-click in a green-brown tide,
in an arcing shoal of alien life. They will be
almost as strange to you as your own life,

if you ever see it for what it is; almost
as strange as the life you haven't lived.

vii. The king of hearts
Under the bridge, Twan of New York
has painted hearts in red and black.
Overhead the cars pass up and down Guess Road.
Climb the embankment—it's terraced
in red dirt, like a ziggurat--
and you can touch the roadway
with the flat of your hand.

Here you can escape the rain and sun
and even the traffic noise.
This is a sturdy bridge: 
at rush hour it doesn't shake or groan,
but hums like a big cat
after a kill. Twan
whose middle name is Dante

has sprayed on a lengthwise beam
just under the road bed, a red beetle--
the people's car, humped like a bison--
and on the concrete support
a rural mailbox labeled Old Farms.
Any escape is good, if you can find it. 
Here others, or Twan himself, warn

'fagots' of an imprecise wrath,
and you can inspect the products of the age--
flattened beer cans, Xmas paper
still in shape of the box,
a price list (suggested retail) for barstools,
flecks and shards of styrofoam.
As for every other spot of land,

someone no doubt has died for this.
Twan, perhaps, could live for it.
--Crucible, Fall 1994; winner of Sam Ragan Prize
  
Notes
ii. Italicized lines are from John Gordon, "If She Bends, She Breaks," in Aidan Chambers, ed., A Haunt of Ghosts.
iv. “airings”—a pun on airain, the French word for bronze
v. “the bluer book”—a joking allusion to the published notes of lectures by Wittgenstein called the Blue Book.
 
Posted 22 December 2024