For My Sick Daughter

I don’t know what woke me, maybe the darkness of the morning, feeling more like twilight, which has turned to winter as I stare. Maybe the impending pressure of the air. I had only gotten a few hours of sleep for the last few nights, worrying.

Funny that it came out quatrains without trying. I would like eventually to illustrate this poem with the photos I took this morning, like those paintings of strange Chinese mountains that actually exist.

What this poem doesn’t say is how reassuring and comforting this sudden storm was in the middle of a week of sullen mountain weather, far away from my family in New York, struggling with crippling illness, and what sanity was restored in the memories that flooded back with the snow, how during the nightmare of the spring a quick breath of saner winters was intruded without warning. The snow was a cleansing, a reminder of what life had been like before the diseases.

….with just one flake,
And the silent clouds like dominos
Fall to muffled snows
Like the plastic globe you shake.

The brush, fired up with summer heat,
Grabs the infant slush and holds it all
Better than the colder twigs of fall
As if the branches needled the diseases.

The poem really lies in the cracks between what I wrote and the sadness it contradicted. Maybe this is where these notes serve a less prosaic purpose.

Grown big as Christmas lights,
The upper world’s frozen fruits
Tumbling down like parachutes,
Waterfalls of egg whites

Beaten larger, so that the air
Is now one transparent thing….

A few minutes later the blizzard was over, the spring sun came out, and within a few minutes the delicate traces were gone. I would have missed them had I slept. I can actually stand in my robe surrounded by the slump of melting snow and be hot in the sun. Clouds swirl around the house. Here is a meadow that wasn’t there a second ago, there a hill separates from bigger ones, glorified by mist. Distant high alps appear and vanish. The world opens and closes, the roads red in the storm light. My heart is flooded with love for the world, because in a few days it will be gone, back in the hot summer city.

I feel as if I’ve stolen these moments from a sick child. This is a moment I shouldn’t’ve had. Iridescent bluejays flutter around the feeders. Birds sang throughout the storm, which is what I did, too. It lasted maybe twenty minutes, enough to change the valley and the season, long enough to finish my poem, whose raison d’être has now entirely vanished. From this I conclude that art is composed of moments. It is broken thing. There is no continuity to it. How much can happen in seconds. I’m going back to bed.

Jules Verne wrote several stories, including the novel Off on a Comet, where the liquid sea is held in supercooled equilibrium just below its freezing point, until a piece of ice disturbs its stasis and it freezes solid in a second. The ice provides an impurity, the nucleation site, organizing the chaotic atoms into a cluster, a catalyst, which allows the atoms to lock themselves into the crystal structure of a solid. The false spring of hope solidifies again to winter as the thaw is covered by new snow.

This was a phenomenon different than supercooling; it was own metaphor for despair.

May 27th, 1996, Tippet Alley