This poem was previously published at Dispatches for the Poetry Wars, and reprinted in the Poetics for the More-than-Human-World anthology. It is part of the Archives series in The Decadent Review (Archives of Summer, Archives of Autumn).
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
—Wallace Stevens, “Farewell to Florida”
I
They say it is colder than Mars
in Oneonta today, a
meteorological bomb,
vortex arctic.
The sun in a cloudless sky can’t
pierce the valley’s snow-haze, a blank
mass in the cyclogenesis,
but the news won’t tell you that part.
The weather’s dominion over
our dread has crystallized.
Gray and bare, the thaw reveals
how little we have to discuss.
II
One must be a stable genius
of winter to hazard the year’s
convention; and have declined the
mayonnaise scissors frozen
in the proceedings of nothing’s question’s
negative as a tool for reading the
palimpsests of frost in the rear window glass
to tolerate the ice-encased branches of their
social-material feed;
and evanesced wind chill
on tongues, the gloom of
failing space, which releases the pale
exhaust of hearing the gravity of snow,
its distance encroaching on
what will be there tomorrow and perhaps later.
III
There is a slow focus to subzero rhythms,
their heavy thermodynamic tread somber and
replete with anthologies of futurity.
The frigid metals supporting emergency
architecture’s optimistic millennial
forecast cracked beneath the institution’s spectral
weight. Beams of Iceland spar, trellises of halite,
buttresses of quartz razors baroquely latticed
through membranous folds of stalagmitic icicles,
once catachrestically supporting feeling,
their umwelt, were now unconditionally sere,
falling into the unfreezing saline bath of
some insomniac mass, delivered, finally,
to a welcome interpellation of what seemed
an unceasing hemispheric perspective on
their activity. The power environing
these revelatory losses knew nothing of
the length of their shivering and could not regard
their disarticulated pathos as worthy
of medial commentary. Crashing through the
flocculent breakers, they nonetheless persisted
in waking unmeasured reserves of biomass
from their depthless slumber in the sodden tissue
of this forgotten, unmoving paleosphere
structuring a keening foresight about just two
potentialities: ambient quagmire or
perspicacious convoy. If they situate pre-
dawn descriptions of the quaintly stirring valley
against the sibilance of onrushing polar
blasts from the quilting point of their indigent dreams,
they might listen: become droning winter. Later,
at the plodding parade between towers of ice,
their anxiety was exhumed and traded with
others’. The algid alleys’ width dwindled until
only the smallest could keep moving. Too few watched
as each succumbed to the lifeless cold. Others, warm
elsewhere, went on, listless and mute, ensconced in
a different order, but waiting, still. Piano
notes crept along the horizon; weak drums sounded
the radiative background; cellos froze the air.