Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I learned from all those mornings of weekly commuting — living in Burlington, Vermont and teaching in New York City — that my passions run in every direction. To the critique and dismay of friends, I would simply say, travel fulfills the country-mouse-city-mouse in me. I need the clamor of New York City, cuisines from around the world, islands of people at busy intersections waiting to merge, strangers dancing salsa together at park concerts, the tenderness of visions in art museums and galleries, not to mention my Trinidadian barber.

Equally so, I need the pastoral simplicity of Vermont, its forested mountains and open fields, its white steeples, tumbling streams, its picturesque red barns and snowy pastures. I contain multitudes and sound my barbaric yawp in subzero weather and in stultifying subway stations. Why shouldn’t I consume the breadth of the world, consume all that satiates my curiosity and longings? I am always at the ready to discover the secrets of the universe.

But then, deep winter arrives, and my choices rescind. The idea of leaving the house, let alone the state, feels unfathomable. In winter, my disposition devolves to a burrowed stillness, where walking across the tundra and breaking the top layers of ice crust satisfies some psychic purpose. I anchor deep into the pleated folds of dark days and nights that vacillate between a dreamy moonscape and an arctic polar station. My routines turn my home into a monastery; I devour books, sit beside wood fires, and give myself over to a spiritual silence that points me to the mysteries. When spring comes slowly through the mud, I awake again to the cycle of different discoveries.

Today’s poem ponders the ordeal of a long winter, return to a childhood home, and the keen awareness of another life of warmth.

First of March
by Stacie Cassarino

For a while we believed the iced-in world
is the real one. There is no reason 
to come out from it. The fire warms 
us, so does volcanic wine, and soup
made from the bones of the animal 
down the road. Is it cow or pig? my daughter
asks, and all I feel is guilt. The plow
comes and goes, the only sign of human
contact. I miss friends in the city 
I once called home. I miss the West,
ripples of heat in the desert, the chair 
at the pool at the lodge in Palm Springs
where I floated on my back for days
that March of two deaths, thorny 
bougainvillea crawling pink on every wall.
How did I get here from there? Down the hall,
my father combs my daughter’s hair.
My mother reads a rhyming book 
to the babies, and surely their fingers 
try to touch each page. The days 
repeat. The windows are blank.
We wake, we eat, we sleep. What more
from this life am I permitted to want
while the survival of others depends 
on me alone? Then everything melts:
snowbank, spruce, garden grave-
yard, ghost-berry. A wind blows
the swing. It is lighter longer. And as if
there’s nothing to mourn, my daughter jumps
maniacally in the driveway puddle,
some song in her head from the future.

“First of March” by Stacie Cassarino from EACH LUMINOUS THING © 2023 Stacie Cassarino. Used by permission of Persea Books.