Dandeliondeath

“Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The ‘far away,’

languages of desert, languages of ocean, language of sky,

as of the unfathomable worlds that lie

between the apple and the eye,

these are the only words we learn to say.

Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day

We find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,

A sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.”

• Conrad Aiken, “A Letter from Li Po”

I

Winter is the season of exile.

Locked in our mortal cages, penned in by snow, by cold,

We drift incommunicado. Christmas is just a brief reprieve. Memory is

our constant companion.

We lay low, huddle, make plans for the days of summer. Remember the sun. Remember the heat, volleyball, lemonade, the beach.

Time has broken off, taken shape, crystalized. Months, weeks, days, hours and hours, minutes and minutes. Count them.

White. Gray. Black. We will never touch the open plateau of shining Divine eternity: winter the dandeliondeath sheaths us in; and after it, the seasons that follow.

II

Winter is a closed eternity of loss. Cold October winds recall cross-country races:

Autumn before the break,

Stinging air,  mist chaffing like sandpaper my arms and legs.

My legs moved without my telling them, sun setting amid the golden hills

And I ran, a flood of feet over the leaves and wilted trampled grass,

short of breath and wishing I had gloves to cover my red raw hands.

I never came in first. But the overwhelming burn of defeat isn’t the only feeling October winds call back from fields of stiffening hay, from halcyon edges of cool beaches.

After the races the runners would walk slow and stiff to their families, who held blankets and thermoses for them, chairs were set out, buckets of apples, boxes of dunkin donuts laid out for them and their friends.

I alone would take a book from my backpack and read, waiting for the bus to come.

And then winter. No running. No races. Family all around, books, cards, cocoa.

Outside: silence in the morning, clumps of snow from wind-twisted fir branches, deer tracks

Where warmth and hoof-hardness, bone and fur pushed back the soft

Invasion

My thoughts spreading out like my breath. I have lost everything lush,

Everything free, everything fast and joyous; I am condemned, but I am innocent. Winter reduces us to a shameful nudity; painful; ugly; maintained at the cost of death. So we accept defeat and

Bundle up.

III

The snow, the purity, the loss: they exile us to our mortality, to internality.

But it is from the inside, from here, the point of remembering, of reconvening,

That we conceive the seeds of rebirth. I remember spring: the crab apple tree

Heavy with soft clinging fragrance, glimmering white of a thousand

Perfect petals. I remember summer:

The rise of dandelions,

The mercurial eternity of victory.