Witt---cooking with gas this trip. excellent. a deep portion of irony and logical surprise at the end; how easy to only give us the atmospheric of a frosty morning, but this reader wants more---and the poem delivers.
now, DS's edit. yes, i prefer the edit---sharper and even more detailed. the edit also deletes the adjective---
gray world. a bland and predictable modifier, i agree to delete, but i don't agree with another exception:
I run a fingernail through
the hoar on the window
touch its bland to my tongue
then turn from the pane
I'm out of scotch
that word
then. it makes the narrative even smoother, but at the expense of an empty word when every word is in the highest focus.
I vote for your original phrasing, no
then word need apply.
the poem has established an abrupt narrative pattern without punctuation so the final lines do not come as a textual surprise.
irony. the sweet and the sour, the hot and the cold. contrast.
Miniver Cheevy made this a classic form:
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
-- Edwin Arlington Robinson
why not try, for fun, to locate a second irony for this poem---?
alcohol may be too easy.
i love hemingway's classic in
A Farewell to Arms --- Katherine tells lt. Henry---i hate the rain---sometimes i see myself dead in it.
and of course, she later dies in childbirth with a drenching rain on the hospital windows and the retreating baggage cars of the defeated Italian army.
fixing two i've used recently to conclude your poem:
after the somber observations of cold in the poem---
The lenten season opens slowly, the snow already falling.or, as Kathleen says, a story within a story---the stoic observations that might conclude with a surprise:
I haven’t spoken for an hour,
my wife asks if I’m seeing someone else.you see what i mean.
another favorite written while the poet was in jail for political protest of the VN war:
moonless night —
in the harvested wheat field
i, too, am empty
…Johnny Baranski
here the bleak atmospheric is used as a foundation for the empty feeling experienced by the poet.
and two from sarah jane sloat---our own ibpc winner:
1. It is becoming more difficult to write a letter
from the slow country of summer.
The light makes a mess of the trees.
2. The lawn chair broods in a corner
way off the map.
and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg:
1. Taxi ghosts at dusk pass Monoprix in Paris 20 years ago.
2. Put on my tie in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate.
3. Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y.
Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella.
mojave
