Poem By Maura Stanton

I finally had some private time today to read. I picked up a book I had bought used over the winter. fanning the pages, I could smell a faint musky perfume inside the folds. I think I would have liked where this book lived before I became its owner. I wonder what scent will be left on it when I am through?

What piqued me most was that I had written the short short in the previous post early early this morning, and the first poem I opened to in Stanton's book is this:

The Snow House

I could kick down the children's igloo
in two minutes, telling them how dangerous
structures of snow can be, or merely
fall against the roof...
They watch me gravely, expecting
admiration for the ice welding
done with the garden hose for permanence.
But I remember my husband's story
recollected in irony:
how the neighbor children
sealed him in their snow fort
& when he burst through, was it
imagination? His lungs hurt--
That night I dreamed of ghostly children
passing me in a snow field.
"We have buried him!" they chanted,
melting as I ran blinded
into the white dark of the blizzard.

Remembering that dream, these children
frighten me with their innocence.
Their eyes would darken
if I described suffocation in their ice palace,
how adults fear their small fists
smashing towards them in visions
trapped like kaleidoscope designs...
infinite, made with a few stones.
That child in the red hat
is me, moving across the snow, singing.

Crawling inside, the blue walls
remind me of my brother's snow house
where I hid once in anger,
licking the ice until my tongue stuck.
"Let's pretend to freeze to death!" the children
shout from outside as I imagine
turning silver before their shocked eyes
the way I wanted to then, absolute
under my mother's wild hands.
Outside, I wipe the frost off my cheek
praising their fierce construction.
If I kicked their snow house into snow,
I'd return each night
to build it up, flake by flake...



The structure of this poem is so smart. The child in red... I am a woman in red lost in the palace of winds...

Addendum: At the same time I was writing my post below, my daughter was taking her final exams. When she came home from school, she said in her final art exam, students were instructed to go to the internet, choose a picture, and write a story to it. She chose a photo of a woman sitting in a tree in the desert from the 1900's. The woman was wrapped in white gauze. Collective unconscious, indeed!