The trees have lost their color and the mountains on the drive to and from work are mostly brown. In the mornings, there’s a still and quiet beauty to them – their soft rolling tops yawn in the shadows and light of the rising sun. But tonight, as I drove home, the sky felt serious and the winds whipped clouds low through the valley and over the peaks. Light snow was blowing and a few gusts pushed strong enough against the car to make it swerve. The world seemed hard and cold and I had an urge to read poems about winter – poems about drives late in the night, lonesome roads under tall pines and snow soft and muted on the ground. Poems about cabins, the crackle of fireplaces, and the small solitary glow in the long winter dark.
I thought for sure I’d find such a poem in a book titled Landscape at the End of the Century. It’s one of several books I have by poet Stephen Dunn. I opened up to a random poem hoping to glimpse, in writing, the pine barrens of New Jersey – where Dunn lived for part of his life. I came upon a poem about Communication. It seemed like an odd coincidence – I had just written about the topic. Dunn pulls back the veil. A snippet:
Safe to say that most men who want
to communicate,
who would use that word, are shameless
and their souls long ago have drifted
out of their bodies
to faraway, unpolluted air.
Such men no doubt have learned women
are starved
for communication, that it’s the new way
to get new women, and admission of weakness
works best of all.
Hmmm… I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, it wasn’t the wintry landscape I had been looking for. I thumbed through a few more poems and got a little lost. The heater kicked on and the wind did what wind does against the window panes. I was looking for a way to describe it all – winter descending, mid-November night.