Winter Sequence
I
I dig my fingers into the flesh
Of night’s wound. Honey-pale,
The webbing of the stars torn
Out, again and again.
The snow falls like the flapping
Of a tigermoth’s wings.
II
I spend afternoons in the gardens
Of the sanatorium,
Picking orchids from the air;
Peeling away the
Muscular honeycombs
Of my dying, sorrowful brain.
III
The snow is hollow to the touch. Things are
So beautiful here in the mountains.
In the spring the tubers will push themselves
Out of the earth and give us life again,
The way butterflies dream of next year’s wings-
So obscene and lovely, pulled apart in the hands.
IV
I am winter-broken,
The tendon of life severed
And curled back into the muscle.
Now I lay at the navel of the earth
Unwrinkled like a child;
There are real stars in the sky
V
In the spring hyacinths will bloom
In the white hills, and
Obscure themselves,
Because they are so fragile,
The pale petals, and dead nightingales;
All that we grieve for.
Mariel Glass |
levelheaded: Winter Sequence
Mariel Glass’ “Winter Sequence” opens with a grotesque act—the speaker digging his or her “fingers into the flesh.” The violence of this line is softened by the enjambment that follows, as the second line teaches us that the flesh in not human flesh, but instead belongs to “night’s wound.” We are forced to let go of the initial image of fingers digging into flesh to consider the meaning of the phrase “the flesh / Of night’s wound.” Perhaps it refers to a “Honey-pale” morning in which “The webbing of the stars [is] torn / Out, again and again.” Or, perhaps night’s wound is the sky opening not for sunlight, but for star-like snow that “falls like the flapping / of a tigermoth’s wings.”
Tigermoth. Now that is a crazy word—at once a muscular predator and a fragile light chaser. In this singular word, as is the case with the first stanza and the poem as a whole, Glass does not give us a complete and consequently narrow narrative, but instead utilizes white space to foster individual interpretation. The poem has an airy quality about it, yet it is held together by certain consistencies. Each section is made up of three couplets set off as their own stanzas. All the lines are close to the same length. And, perhaps most importantly, the content of one section subtly echoes in the next.
The snow of stanza one reverberates in the “orchids from the air” of stanza two. The phrase “Honey-pale” from line two is morphed into “Muscular honeycombs / Of my dying, sorrowful brain” at the end of the second section. That beloved tigermoth too is conjured up in the impossible duality of “Muscular honeycombs.” Continuing this trend, section three is marked by sonic and metaphorical links to what comes before it. The sound of the “sorrowful brain” can be heard in “The snow is hollow to the touch,” and the visual image presented in this latter sentence is akin to an empty honeycomb. Emptiness itself takes new shape in the form of “the tubers [that] will push themselves / Out of the earth and give us life again.”
Because “Winter Sequence” is laced with complexity, Glass earns the right to a line like “There are real stars in the sky.” In this statement, the speaker reminds him or herself and the reader that, given all of the gray area that is open to interpretation, some things simply are, and, as such, are beautiful. It is not long after accepting with wonder the beauty of the natural world, however, that our speaker turns inward again. The hyacinths “obscure themselves.” Their fragility, the snow’s fragility, the tigermoth’s fragility, our fragility, represents “All that we grieve for.”
– The Editors