Everything is melting.
Outside, what remains of days of snowfall and ice slick is dripping off gutters and down storm drains and out to the sea. Inside, our brains are gloppy, too, muddled from last week’s school closures and screen time excesses. Sure, there was sledding and cookie baking and snowball throwing but also the fielding of snack requests and negotiating dump truck disputes, shuffling armfuls of wet jackets into the dryer, and eking out work while warming leftovers.
There was a moment, as I stood beside the other parents at the base of the sledding hill commiserating over the difficulties of snow days and deadlines, when I watched my daughter take off down the slope. “This is the best day of my life,” she shouted. And isn’t that how it is, I thought, our best-worst days all mixed up.
So! I’ve been feeling a bit puddly. When it comes to reading, all I managed to do last week is half-listen to the same five minutes of an audiobook over and over again, hoping not to get interrupted or drift off to sleep.
But over the weekend, as things opened up again and normal life resumed, I spent mornings and nap times with a poetry collection that arrived last month rather mysteriously.
I found the book while cleaning up after our holiday party. There, on the kitchen counter, was a paper bag from our local independent bookstore, and inside was Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater.
I included it in the list of lost and found items I texted to guests the next morning — a sock, a cutting board, a serving spoon, a cloth tote, a book of poems — but no one claimed it. And so, after enough time passed, I pronounced it mine.
Meltwater’s opening poem is a riotous assemblage of sound and language, a meditation on the letter O, on all the world’s objects and openings, on obsidian and oysters and onions, on “the os of the cervix, the double Os of the ovaries.”
The second poem is a series of couplets on “Hunger.” And the third poem struck me to the core as cleanly as an icicle to the heart. Addressed to the speaker’s unborn child, it’s called “You Will Soon Enter A Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You.”
A mother observes the movements beneath her skin:
I pulse with doorknobs that bob then sink back into the sea of me, ungraspable.
And, confesses that she has:
done all I can to make it easy for the world to wrap itself around you and squeeze. I have no plan to keep the chemicals separate from the lake, the acid separate from the rain, the bird from the glass that breaks it. Thud.
And, ponders the inherent risks of bringing a child into the world:
I could have planted brambles, clovers. I could have just loved the earth instead of inventing new ways to hurt.
And, finally, anticipates the birth of her child:
I am about to set my heart down into a wild burrow. A clock is about to start.
That last line brought my racing heart to a standstill, like a bird strike. Thud.
*
While we were snowed in, I took out my daughter’s water colors to make monsters. She’s five and loves a project. So one afternoon, during her little brother’s nap, we swirled our wet paint brushes, watching the pots of paint fill with water. Just before they overflowed, we lifted them up and let the paint splash out onto the page.
With drinking straws, we blew currents of air that pushed through the puddles, our breath leaving eddies of color in its wake.
When the paint dried, we added silly faces and fangs and stick figure legs to these splatters and blobs and called them monsters, giving shape to what might be lurking beneath the bed, laughing at them and making light of our fears.
*
Throughout Wahmanholm’s collection, there is a series of poems titled “Meltwater,” and according to a note at the back of the book, each of these is an erasure poem whose source text is Lacy M. Johnson’s essay, “How to Mourn a Glacier.”
“No word appears in more than one erasure,” she explains. “In other words, the size of the pool decreases with each erasure.”
Wahmanholm’s erasures enact what we are losing in this century. Glaciers, yes, but also language.
I’ve written before about the strange and difficult experience of teaching my children the names of animals I know to be endangered, of giving them language for a world that’s rapidly changing.
Looking at the puddles of Wahmanholm’s words disappearing on the page, I found myself wishing that I could soften what’s monstrous instead of facing it, that I could pick up a drinking straw and take a deep breath and chase my fears across the paper.
*
Eventually I pieced together the mystery of the book’s arrival. For almost a decade now, a few long-distance friends and I have drawn names for a holiday book exchange. I surmised that one of them had ordered Meltwater from our local bookstore, which offers home deliveries. A guest must have noticed the gift bag beside our front door on the day of the party and carried it inside.
And so, I was not surprised, not really, when I received a note about the book from my friend Ellen, a poet and mother of two who works in river conservation. Of course it was from her. A thoughtfully chosen book, hand delivered. The right book at the right time.
*
Just as I was immersed in Meltwater’s final pages, my daughter called down to where we were sitting in the living room. It was like a spell breaking as I emerged from the book. She wanted to show us what she’d done.
What she’d done was make a beach — scattering her collection of stones and shells onto the carpet — a place for our family to sit together, she said, and have a picnic while watching the sunset.
So, I sat beside her at the water’s edge, on a beach blanket spread before the tide lines she’d made with smooth stones and broken shells and bits of beach glass.
And I looked out the window, at the cold sky and the snow melting from the eaves.
How are you holding up? Are you snowed in? What have you been reading, making, or watching to pass the time?