Encountering Winter

by Karen Mathieson

Winter along the 45th Parallel in the Pacific Northwest is a matter of degrees – and of elevation. Near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, stray blasts of Arctic air confound forecasters. The sky above Portland fills with swirling patterns like the froth of a thousand lattes, while the surface becomes a solid LED display of blinking red brake lights.

Most of the time, as Sharon Wood Wortman notes in Windfall, a regional poetry journal, “Our natural worry is flood, the rain lately slumping the earth to her knees like the converted come to Jesus.”

I like this imagery on both auditory and tactile counts. In concussive alliteration, we hear those knees strike the floor. With the verb “slump” in a sense best known to potters, we are reminded of the mucky, slippery, heavy ways precipitation can change life in the lowlands.

Not that sunlight is entirely absent in winter here, and crocuses and violets do appear beside and within mossy, astringent green February lawns. It’s still tempting to escape, even if briefly.

Some prowl the coastline and return with poems. “Waves leapfrogged and came straight out of the storm,” wrote Oregon’s late Poet Laureate, William Stafford about the hurly-burly at the beach. In a skillful turn of vowels, “I hear the wind honing my bones clean as driftwood,” writes Mark Thalman, a contemporary Oregon poet who helps keep Stafford’s memory alive.

Others head for Mount Hood and another vocabulary for the senses. Glisten, gleam, sparkle, crunch – when I strap on a pair of snowshoes, I am elated by the words set free in my mind.

It Melted Away in 1912

Emily Dickinson never donned snowshoes, but she knew that feeling well. At first tracking snowflakes with the sedate protocol of a census taker, she is soon swept by delight: “I did resign the prig – and ten of my once stately toes are marshaled in a jig!”

For a bracing alternative, consider the poetics of winter along the Eastern seaboard and beyond in an essay by poet Annie Finch: “One brief winter image can infuse an entire poem in a few pen-strokes, bare-branch-black and snowdrift-white.”

A poet’s encounter with nature often reveals how we humans project our concerns, our culture, our very selves into the world around us. Listen to this post’s podcast companion A Word Upon the Wind: Encountering Winter to hear a pair of 19th-Century Americans doing that in markedly different ways – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow eloquent on the unburdening of a  “troubled sky,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson exuberant after a “tumultuous privacy of storm.”