Snow Globe

A poem about memory

Several weeks ago I took part in the great midwestern tradition of being upended by a crafty patch of ice. I’m being glib about it because I don’t want anyone to worry. I’m totally fine (yes, even despite the injuries I’m recovering from, hallelujah!) so don’t let the reference to the doctor’s visit in the poem below make you think otherwise. The experience did inspire a few things, though (other than bruises), including a deep distrust of our porch steps and the following poem.

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Snow Globe

I write, and make metaphors about the great evanescing stream of moments, so quickly fading into a downstream mist, that makes up a life. I admire the old haiku masters, who were particularly good at this, with all their talk of leaves on water, cherry petals falling, and evaporating dew. What, though, am I to make of, or write of those wet rocks worn smooth by their very immovability, immersed in all this, or the debris that lingers, clinging to them, or the creatures which occasionally leap or crawl out onto the banks and speak in singular voices?

As yesterday evening, passing through an average weeknight—making beef and barley soup, exchanging the sounds and words of a long relationship with my husband the while, then saying, ”I’m going out to do the chickens,” in that unremarkable, remembrance-free way I have said it hundreds of times before, except this time the moment doesn’t burst in its usual soap-bubble habit into nothingness. It emerges, crystalized, as my heel slips on the porch’s top icy step, which in another fleeting, barely-noticed moment of cognition, my mind had deemed safe. Deceptive, the bricks—clear despite a day-long mist of nearly vaporous snow, melted as intended by the salt scattered that morning by my husband, and just refrozen into a nearly invisible varnish of smooth ice. 

It is over before I even realize it has begun. Flat on my butt, on which I landed, I sit listening to my immediate recall memory playing over and over the “oh,” that came out of me at the moment of impact—quieter than I would have expected, an exhale carrying with it a simple, sorrowful note. 

It is something like a snow globe, this strange object now in my possession. Morning, the next day, I sit smarting, waiting for the doctor to diagnose the deep and profoundly present pain in my hip, and I shake up this moment again and again, watching the features of this little miniature fill in—the dusky yard bright with snow, the Christmas lights threaded through the porch rails glowing beatifically down onto my purple coat, my old crinkly snow pants, my open hands, held by old work gloves, palms down on the slick bricks that have upended me and caught me, both.
With each examination, it grows finer and more detailed.

When I have finished crafting it, I will place it on a shelf beside its fellow curios and relics where things such as this, things which have found their way to exist outside of time and its oblivion, wait in their odd durability, ready to hand, for, say, a ponder or the need of a tale, there in the great cabinet of memory, enduring.

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