Apr 22 2009
in which alaska’s breakup season lets me write a poem using spring as a metaphor for death
No, I’m totally serious. I actually wrote it a few years ago, back before I had a car and took the bus way too much, but the idea is the same. The season described here is really just spring in name only, though; it’s actually breakup, like I described in my previous entry.
As I said, though, it’s much nicer now–well, today was gray and kind of windy, and there’s a huge difference between cloudy 40° and sunny 40°, but there’s still clean pavement and the grass isn’t greening up yet but we can see it again, and the temperatures should be edging into the fifties in the next week or so. I might actually be able to wear a skirt soon without freezing! Would have done that Tuesday if I’d known the weather would be that way. The best part is that even though all the grass is all still dead and brown, now and then you can still smell something that–well, I suppose it’s actually, I don’t even know, suddenly uncovered rotting grass and leaves or something else nasty, but it smells like life, like green and growing things.
Anyway, poem, which I’m sharing because I can and also because it was already published a couple years ago in Understory, my uni’s little literary magazine.
Remnants
Yesterday it was a trailer park, one glimpsed
as the bus rattled by—
rotted awnings, potted plants struggling out of
what wasn’t spring, blue tarps tucked
over unidentifiable somethings—and then it was passed,
and past.
Today it is the bus stop,
all utilitarian metal and plexiglass, some color halfway
black and brown, a hybrid, and ridges
on the narrow bench.
No graffiti here, but the window-walls are scratched
and scarred.
Molding snow clings to the shelter,
fading burial mound of winter and its hoary fingers
spiny with frost.
The mud has not its sharp resolve,
but the wet gritty gravel
(it never really leaves the streets,
though it collects on the grass like ash)
could be a weaker echo.
Decaying snow leaves litter in its wake—predictable,
this, surer almost than the seasons (certainly, surer
than any throbbing bloodbeat).
Lingering lives, these: remnants of
things that always fall just behind.
Only a leaf—perfectly formed
and face-down in the mud—is still green.
It’s a fake, imitation spun from
plastic and silk.
Genuine leaves nearby are long since brown and sodden.
Cigarette butts lie here and here,
and here:
some, limp, in the trash can bolted to the shelter’s side, but
more clouding the ground.
All the smokers had their stories. There were
thoughts—ephemeral things, or
possibly ethereal, some of them—
but they do not remain here.
Thoughts are too fleeting for steel and concrete.
Only their ghosts lie soggy on the ground;
and perhaps the stories choked in sooty lungs,
or drifted away in the smoke, indistinguishable—
and then, too, indistinguished.
(But this is the way of all flesh.)
Wait one week and it is all of it gone. The wind
has blown even the mysteries away.
