Poem a Day: 2

2.

Winter Noose

What is it with the weather? Will it ever warm

or will we be stuck in another ice age, freezing

off our fingers and toes, shoveling buckets of snow

from cracked driveways and walks, digging our hands

deep into feathered pockets, winding wool scarves

around our delicate necks in soft nooses?

I’m pretty sure that this winter has braided a noose

around my emotional neck, squeezing the warm

blood left in my body out of my brain. Black scarves

fall over my eyes in veils and I can’t breathe, freezing

into a block of bitter confusion, my white hands

drained, hollow and abandoned as the old snow

in the backyard.  And just when I think the snow will

finally stop falling, another ugly coat descends, noosing

around tree roots, coating the maple’s arthritic hands.

Huddled in my office, or kitchen, I try to warm myself

against a cup of sludgy coffee, aging face freezing

against the utter lack of possibility.  I knit scarf after

scarf, flashing the needles like matches against scarves

of Arctic air on the windows.  And I don’t care if the snow,

as you suggest, is beautiful, each flake individual – I freeze

inside thinking of its cold attack, its midnight descent, nooses

of celestial despair gathering on the lawn. How can I warm

my middle-aged heart when the weather keeps handing

me scraps of the underworld, bits of death in fairy hands

tapping the innocent glass, asking to be let in?  No scarf

can protect me against this hellish breath. Smelling it, warmth

proves illusion, like Florida -- lost to the south, to snowy highways

still slicked with icy despair.  So I knit my elaborate nooses

and hang myself daily. I suspect my spirit has frozen, and

I worry we’re entering a new ice age. That we’re each freezing

slowly but surely into an individual mold, holding numb hands

locked in zippered pockets. We can’t touch, noosed off as we are

from love and connection in coats and hats and gloves and scarves.

Surely we will lose our souls and minds --dive into the next snow

as if into a glacial ocean, seeking, deep down, below all, a warmer life.

April 2, 2014