Wintering
i.
It is quiet enough for the morning to begin
its apologies, or mine, a sullen cough of grackles
in the window, two small wings curving back,
a notched tail swooping past, two or more dozen
this time gathering on the lawn as the sky turns
slowly slate, the wind with its slow fingers plinking
the maples & oaks. To touch & be touched.
ii.
Three snowflakes stick to the window then disappear
the way ghosts fade into walls in old movies.
The snow spills like stars shredding onto soil
& suddenly the world weighs like a wound wrapped
in the white, wet wool of premature winter & I sink
deeply into the muddy cave of my own body.
iii.
Darkness nestles into my neck & I’m bone-broken, body-bloodied, light-lost. But more than that,
my eyes are still open. I hug myself,
knees to chest, angled away from the window—
this body knows before & after, remembers how
I’ve spent afternoons gathering wreckage,
enough shell fragments to build a bomb.
iv.
An underworld blooms beneath me, trees above
& below, bombs & birds easily forgotten.
It’s the nothing that is. The way crying isn’t words:
it’s all just noise, & in that realization is something
so exquisitely lovely you can sometimes feel
your body shaken to its bones—I drink it up,
feel it in my thirst, feel it tighten around my throat.
v.
& when the storm is over, when the sun reappears,
having experimented with how long I could live
without it, like a God who needs reassurance
I am unable to live without Him: yes, that’s what
the light is for me—I can take its absence only so far—
I become something more than a large open wound
trying to heal as the world walks through,
become the winter dreaming the verb to be.
Ariana D. Den Bleyker
Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of four collections and twenty-one chapbooks, among others. She is also Founder and Publisher of ELJ Editions, a 501(c)(3) literary nonprofit. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words.
Why Martheaus loved it:
Jumping jellybeans, Batman! This poem can sing. Look at how well this poem combines sibilance (S sounds), elongated assonance (the vowel sounds like Oooo and Eeee), and alliterative Ws in section ii: "Three snowflakes stick to the window then disappear / the way ghosts fade into walls in old movies./ The snow spills like stars shredding onto soil / & suddenly the world weighs like a wound wrapped / in the white, wet wool of premature winter & I sink / deeply into the muddy cave of my own body.” These lovely sounds aren’t just for show, either; the sound work aids the material of the poem. For example, the harder consonance sounds (Ds and Bs) in section iii help add that feeling of being brushed against--that wreckage of the body.
This is a little cliche, but “Wintering” is a great example of why we use poetry to get at the things that are difficult to put in words--logical, prose-y words. We can say that we “long,” that we “ache,” or that we have “desperate needs,” but this speaker really gives so much texture to those feelings when they focus on the disappearing snowflakes and ghosts or how "suddenly the world weighs like a wound." Each metaphor seems deeply connected to the content and--as the poem moves--I can really appreciate the speaker's coming to terms in section v. To me, they're grappling with many kinds of absences.