Apu
snow spiral frozen lake
i could have sworn
—
glove over glove
a polar proximity we
evolutionarily close steam
breathes into thaw if we could
only get rid of our wet for a moment
more rock than budding limb
where a streetlight’s doused in flurry
and still the black
ocean crashing
just above that distant
strobe a mountain who
set this storm
or bared its teeth
against this swept nimbus
—
What is the name
for ice frozen
under ice frozen
in ice?
A matryoshka, two
buzzing tadpoles clung,
centered.
Hurl a stick high
arcing, crashing
— winter lets out
the memory of sound,
a wicked whirling
cackle — equal parts
boom and echo.
This poem came from a response to a new favorite poem by Christian Wiman, The Weakness Meaning Time. I was reading that poem over and over and, when I read it aloud, the words “polar loneliness” really stuck with me. Something about the way they felt to say — completely slowing down the reading of the poem. For this poem, I prompted myself to see what happened if I inverted that phrase because, well, the world has been cold this last week. “Polar proximity” is what I came up with. A huddling for warmth, a nearness instead of distance.
The poem has three movements, each a fragment from a different wintery walk I took this year but my memory has bled into one when it snows. It’s like that cliched flattening of the world when two lovers look at the same moon in a different location, only, a flattening of time to where I’ve only known a world with and without snow. I’m reminded of another poem that I’ve become quite taken with. It’s about the totality that is snow and I may have already shared before. Like Snow by Wendell Berry:
Like Snow
Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.
The title of today’s poem is “Apu” which we learned is the name that the Incans gave some of the rocks and mountains in the Andes. It means “guardian”.
Thanks for reading.