weather in the heart

Hello everyone! Here we go: year six of National Poetry Month at Casa Olivia. There will be something approximating a poem a day from today until the end of the month. I am both eclectic and predictable. I try not to repeat poets within the course of the month, and I try not to repeat poems I have posted in previous years, but I don't promise not to break my own rules.

This last week has been very bad, in both expected and unexpected ways; and it has been good, from time to time -- at least, having my parents here was good, even if I was not in any kind of emotional state to really enjoy their company. (I also really appreciate all the text messages and twitter hearts and emails and long distance hugs; you guys are very, very wonderful, as I hope you know. ♥) But it was a bad week, and so I want to start this April as I mean to go on: with better things. I am drinking very good coffee out of a mug my roommate bought me that reads, "anyone can be cool, but awesome takes practice," and I cleaned the kitchen while I made coffee; I have poetry books on most available surfaces and a whole damn lot of work to do; and I have Adrienne Rich.

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

—Adrienne Rich, "Storm Warnings," from A Change of World, 1951.

Adrienne Rich died last Tuesday, a year and a day after my brother. I continue to think that he keeps rather good company. I thought about posting several different Adrienne Rich poems for today, including a few I have posted in previous years, and some that are happier than this one, and some that were more recent; but I love this one, rather in the same way that I love thunderstorms.