Wednesday Poems

Image: Leftovers, oil and cold  wax on wood panel, 12” x 12” (sold)



Last weekend, Pender Island got its first snow of the season. It wasn’t much and didn’t last long, but we all braced for the worst, what with the forecasters being uncertain about just how much we’d be in for.  As it happens, the second snowfall was larger, and is sticking around.  Still, I was reminded of what I thought of as a west coast idiosyncrasy when I first moved from New Brunswick to British Columbia. Years later, I wrote a poem about it, so here, to kick off February’s Wednesday Poems, is Out of Season, from Bewildered Rituals (Polestar).


Out of Season


Beneath a street lamp, the soft chaos
of snowflakes falling, as they nudge themselves
between gusts of air like a picture
of someone breathing;

then driven straight against their inclination
into angled arrows, they are weapons
of a wind that comes up out of nowhere,
as if to ridicule
the stubborn faith of people here
in out-of-season rain gear.    

I cannot acclimatize myself
to umbrellas in the snow,
a hopeless coastal habit of denial …
or, is it a kind of resistance to lingering winter,
and in my condescension of mere difference
have I missed their February sense of it:

that tomorrow will bring rain poking holes
in the feeble snow, for crocuses.