Another Year
Sun on winter days like this,
When icicles are mirrors
Of the deepening mist,
Coating pines in layers
Of the leaden sky, beaming snows
On clouds, freezing shimmer
In a crystal haze—sun throws
Water up inversely from the forest floor,
Twirling columns of the deeper flakes
Into upper, colder spikes,
A trade that makes
New versions of the glacial dikes
That sky will vaporize
With sight, the planet’s core
Which emerges on such nights
As, in its depths, hoar
Coagulates to atmospheres,
Coupling lines that thaw
Evaporates in tiers,
The ebbs and flows that draw
The light to dark, the breaches
Of the year, the rhythm
Of convection in the reaches
Of ancestral limbs
Where the world turns around,
Where our false celestial skin
Is riddled through with ground,
The galaxy’s trick engine
Laced in ice beneath our feet,
Airy photosynthesis
That swaps such dazzling heat
For frigid scenes like this,
Light wound up in blizzards lest
The cold that breeds in space
One day comes to rest
In an uncertain human place
Where the solar system’s chilling rays
Woven in your lucid hair
Mirror with their perverse blaze
The closest thing on earth to air.
September 18th, 1995
Bedford
November 11th, 2005
Rancho Santa Fe
Explanation
Bob Jonas mentioned to us as we skied into the Sawtooth wilderness in Idaho one Christmas that depth hoar, snow which evaporates due to the heat of the ground, is the closest thing to air that’s still on the ground.
Overcome with a forest laced with its own latticework of ice and snow, a beauty apparent more on the uphill than the downhill run (because, I am convinced, insight is a function of exhaustion; perception flourishes at rest stops; but too facile a glide downhill replaces novelty with familiarity, which hurts observation), and wanting to preserve the day somehow, I thought that such moments happened because the stability of my wife’s company over the years gave me the sanity to take time out and look around, allowing an occasional flood of recognition where before there had been only the fear of strangeness, the anxiety of an unoccupied world which now was peopled with security, so that perception of nature was in part a perception of our time together, of the ups and downs of marriage as much as of the atmospheric ups and downs of adiabasis.
I had written several poems to air pressure already, and was struck by the parallels between poetry and water vapor. Layers of snow are like cumulative verses that thicken an idea while allowing it to float. The initial heaviness of metaphor lightens as the point is perceived by the mind. Failing such recognition, perhaps an atmosphere is anyhow conveyed which is arguably more important than any logical meaning. Meaning is simply an excuse for beauty. Beauty, on the other hand, may be an excuse for meaning, the justification of nature’s margin of error.
In the same way that nature mirrors our meanings (the pathetic fallacy), nature mirrors itself, duplicating the snowscape in the grey sky, repeating crystal after crystal to make depth hoar or even snowfall. Most interestingly, nature often duplicates things from their opposites, making cold snow patterns from the heat of the earth or the warmth of the sun, so that the air is braided into the ground as the ground evaporates into the air, and we walk on lightness, on a crust made by sun, in the same way we love a woman more each year, because as we age youth is woven into our lives like air spaces in snow, and old age is composed finally of a series of shared youths, the way trees store the fire of the solar system to unwind, as Buckminster Fuller noted, in our hearths.