To the Season, and: Poem for a Winter Night

BUELL 13 FREDERICK BUELL TO THE SEASON In the background a siren & carhorns a team of sanitary engineers heaving trash in the back hopper somebody arguing it is early winter & in general the personality behind events will disappear (thank god for warm rooms & a catholicity of entertainment) & we all rely on the same thing (more than on each other) oh it is getting toward the Christmas season the lights on the beautiful Norweigan pine at Rockefeller Center will be lit the four-story displays of streams of bulbs will jolly up the mercantile part of the city that woman with legs as thick as sausages & a shock of strikingly matted thick white hair will doubtless be back with her three coats & rag bags beneath 42nd St. (noddling away the evening) the winter brings with it a chilly sense of balance here comes a crushed hat (I cannot see the eyes) a thick cloth coat though open and a shetland wool sweater hanging loosely and no bra leading her dog & picking her teeth with two fingers on the Bank Street pier the wind wiping the view of New Jersey over the ice-grey whitecapped slapping of the Hudson clear (I tighten up my scarf on it) as the nights now lengthen & begin to cover more of our brief experience I get up in the breathy cold of the drained grey light with great alacrity & I will not insist further on myself in this context because I am no more than a way of indicating this context (though I thought this was a lyric) letting my attention become other peoples' for example the woman riffling through the bills at the bank & sucking a deep drag on her filter long as a way of refreshing herself (she's been there over 20 years) she is extraordinarily comprehensible to me a middleaged face in a large oval with thick lipstick let me add the pleasure of withdrawing yourself is as deep 14 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW as love whatever you desire you have to subtract from what you love and I will in no way be content to subtract even the rather pettish and affected man I overheard in a supermarket tell someone he was wearing a Pierre Cardin outfit his mother a berouged and imperious looking vain woman standing restlessly by the shopping cart, impatient at being excluded from the conversation I find myself also in sympathy with the man who flung open the door to a trucking company office threw himself one pace outside, then stood stock still shifting his cigar to a right side cud evidently unsatisfied I don't consider myself any the less for taking in these people with concern it's winter here & we're heading toward the solstice though you wouldn't know it the way the city comes alive at night and the corner newsstand casts a block of cheer upon the sidewalk throwing only the most superficial judgement on those who appear within it walking turn completely visible and pass I think of that in more than naturalistic terms as it takes a great deal of the spiritual terror away from me which is a good thing as these nights would like to overwhelm (widi their stars! their stars! spread out billions of miles above the incidental Hudson) whoever looks at them with the chill yet radiantly exultant thought of winter, which, minus fear, is half-bright widi die acceptance of existing POEM FOR A WINTER NIGHT The winter night settled in snowflakes (no wind) fluttering down from all corners of the darkness like the black & white of a Japanese film in which cherry blossoms are falling in a courtyard in the past well, there's much to be had in the paper tonight a 7 1 year old amputee in London who in fur> at her lodger chased her through a park in her invalid's car vengeance, what rage in the old hag's heart she smashed & rode over her lodger, then alas her car went out of control & spun in narrowing circles, flipped BUELL 15 & burst into flames Medea could not have had such bitterness flaring around her victim. Oh the night! the snow pitters down inanely in the frozen pause & maybe in a store open late...