Tabula Rasa
Coptic, cryptic, styptic rune:
Winter’s dark arithmetic.
Clouds close in at noon
On blackened twig and stick,
On dim snow in the underbrush.
Wheat pokes out of page-white plains,
Tundra muffled in the hush.
No detail of the day remains,
Just the wind and sleeping slush.
Erasure is at last complete:
Nothing here but fog and sleet.
Explanation
Cathy says this is like the Rosetta Stone, or like Zork, where you can’t see where your decisions take you, where you are plunged into a new language like Stoppard’s “plank,” which you learn quickly, although you don’t realize it.
Instead of the blank slate, the empty blackboard, the tabula rasa which the poet starts with, this is the blank page we end with. Rasa is expanded to mean erased, rather than just blank, so that human action is included in the view.
It begins and ends with a blank page, and, in the middle, there are weeds. No doubt a metaphor.
From the weeds come reeds, whence come pen nibs, whence come poems. So from the menial comes meaning. But beyond meaning is the simple evocation of mood, of the hush of a dark northern snowstorm, as we had been having in Colorado around February 3rd. Colorado isn’t the far north, as Gould or Nabokov or Glinka thought of it, but it is our mild-mannered equivalent.
There is a sadness to its observations, as we had the ranch for sale and would one day no longer enjoy its pristine isolation, with untouched mountain views for 30 miles. No doubt we would find something as beautiful, but the very act of agreeing to sell eliminated our former serenity and introduced a note of homeless, gypsy anxiety. See the note on the poem “House for Sale.” (We ended up not selling the ranch.)
This is a sort of distended sonnet (two quatrains, with a triplet replacing the final couplet, returning the poem to its cryptic beginnings). “Under” and “tundra,” “wheat” and “complete,” “page” and “day” are inner rhymes.
It was written as an explanation of the poem “Acrostic,” from leftover words, 11:09–11:32 AM, February 3rd, 2001, at Tippet Alley during a snowstorm. Draft 3 was written 11:41–11:47. Here is the first draft:
Coptic, cryptic, styptic rune:
Winter’s dark arithmetic.
Clouds close in at noon
On darkened twig and stick,
On snow mounds in the underbrush.
Wheat pokes out of page white plains,
Muffled in the hush.
No detail of the day remains,
Erasure now complete:
Nothing here but fog and sleet.