pometry

i felt long overdue for the sweet powdery collection that we were granted last night/this morning. it gathered in heavy piles on everything, and i was pleased to see pine branches sagging and tips of greenery poking out randomly from drifts of white when i looked out the window this morning. even more pleased was i when i saw thick snow on my balcony, and numerous bird tracks disturbing the otherwise even surface. the tracks were varied, too, indicating more than one species had decided to check out café cate in the wee hours.

but i was disappointed, for all this visual poetry was nearly for naught. once there was a day when i would have just gone and played in the snow, my responsibilities be damned. now, along with the flicker of joy, is a heavy blanket of Ugh... the car has to be extracted, the slushy streets must be navigated, and into work i must go... only a two-hour delay was declared.

not that i don’t enjoy my job. but i lament that the time has passed where simply enjoying the wintry splendor is passed -- now i must enjoy it AND suffer it, simultaneously.

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speaking of poetry, i’ve been looking over quite a bit of my poetry lately. most of it was written in college; i’ve long discarded any angsty high school poems/lyrics i may have created. when you’re young, those clichés are all new to you, then you get older and more experienced and realize how god-awful your crap was.

and sadly, i feel this way about a lot of what i wrote in college. i took an actual poetry class (never been a prose writer) and felt rather proud of many of my works. one was even accepted for publication in a journal. but now i look back and think how hacked they are, how awkward and boring and predictable. the lines that i once thought were terribly clever are just marginal sentence fragments... poems i thought were meaningful now just ramble on self-indulgently.

i wonder a bit if it’s just me. i’ve lived with these ideas and words for so long they’re now familiar; they’re my picture of a snowy landscape i took that was so lovely when i first put it on the wall, but now looks like every other picture of a snowy landscape i ever saw.

i’m still keeping the work. if nothing else it’s nostalgia for emotions past. and some lines were well-written; i like to think my relationship with the english language is rather intimate, if occasionally abusive and too-familiar on my part. i regret, in a small way, having re-read the pomes (as i dub them -- i hate the word poem). how much better was that inflated memory of literary triumph! but maybe the time for that self-satisfied pride has passed, along with the time for writing pomes, and the time for appreciating a good snow day well and fully. it’s not sad, because other pleasures take their place... but i do get a bit nostalgic, and romantic, and i love the bittersweet flavour.