Zhivagoland
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing goddamm.
--Ezra Pound, from Ancient Music
A raw north wind rages about the plain. This old house, windows painted shut last summer, chinks sealed with can tin, old bed covers laid against the threshold and across the door, is no match for it. It is too cold to write, but it would be a good day to drive somewhere and let the sun warm the soul through the windshield. And if he were on the way to somewhere, I would visit friend Ray. But he has gone to North Dakota, land of sun dogs and Sacagawea, where winters hang on for millennia I am told, and where today, I am certain, it is too cold to write.
Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, doctor, in the dead of a Russian winter, by the light and warmth of a single candle, wrote love poems to Lara. Yet we wonder whether under our present circumstances we will ever write again. Let's not kid ourselves. We are no Doctors Zhivago. We are old men and over time the intense cold of this land has taken its toll on our words, frozen them rock solid in our brains, and no amount of alcohol or a good woman's loving can thaw them into usefulness again. We know. We have tried. We have no answer for it . . . only a few old Mandan prayers that will never be of use to us.
-glwarren, 2014
Notes
Yes, I know, Pasternak and Pound make strange bedfellows. But the epigraph has a history in that even on the so-called southern plains the winter can be brutal. And when we were university students we dreaded its coming so much that at the first sign we began chanting that old Pound verse as if doing so might ward off the worst of it. We were the thinnest of boys with thinner coats and spent a lot of time drinking hot coffee with lots of creamer in the mothering warmth of the student union. Runny noses, watery eyes. Still . . . I believe the beginnings of some of our best literary efforts came from those winters. But that was a long, long time ago.
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