Winter - the snow has yet to fall, so everything outside is dull and lifeless. Snow would cover it up, reflect the light, make things seem better. The temperature of late has been like my mood - up some days, and then down others, and liable to change at any time. The days chart a curious cadence - some fast, some slow. The gloom is almost tangible.

In my life, despair has always ridden shotgun with gloom. Two unwelcome guests who force their way into my life at the end of each year.

Winter seems meant to be gloomy, but sharper with more of a bite than it has been of late. Memories from childhood remind me of the sting and smell of the cold; which is sadly lacking from this winter.

Today’s poem captures a sense of that gloom, that inwardness, that sharp and keen sting.

This Inwardness, This Ice

This inwardness, this ice,
this wide boreal whiteness

into which he's come
with a crawling sort of care

for the sky's severer blue,
the edge on the air,

trusting his own lightness
and the feel as feeling goes;

this discipline, this glaze,
this cold opacity of days

begins to crack.
No marks, not one scar,

no sign of where they are,
these weaknesses rumoring through,

growing loud if he stays,
louder if he turns back.

Nothing to do but move.
Nowhere to go but on,

to creep, and breathe, and learn
a blue beyond belief,

an air too sharp to pause,
this distance, this burn,

this element of flaws
that winces as it gives.

Nothing to do but live.
Nowhere to be but gone.


-- Christian Wiman