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Monday
As we enter the final month of the year, here’s a winter poem by Tom McGrath, who grew up in North Dakota and then moved just across the border—and across the Red River—to teach at the University of Moorhead in Moorhead, Minnesota. In “Beyond the Red River” the poet has watched the progression of the seasons and is now awaiting “a winter lion,/ Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.”
It’s only been a month, McGrath tells us, since “a machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses,” which is to say summer homes “where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs.” In its turn, the “long freight of autumn” has gone “smoking out of the land.” But rather than packing up and journeying south where new things are possible, the poet tells us that he is “happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe.”
As McGrath sees them, the Dakota prairies are like a dark sea, “shaking in the surf of the winter dark.”
Beyond the Red River
By Thomas McGrath
The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.
A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.
Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.
My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.
I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,
Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.
The poem reminds me of Mary Oliver’s “A Poem for the Blue Heron,” which I’ve written about here. There’s so much crossover that I wonder if Oliver took her inspiration from McGrath. Oliver too talks of choosing not to chase what is possible although, in her case, she has long ago given up imagining alternative lives. She has no possibles packed:
I do not remember who first said to me, if anyone did:
Not every thing is possible:
some things are impossible,and took my hand, kindly,
and led me back
from wherever I was.
Regardless of their different life paths, however, both Oliver and McGrath determine to stay in place:
Toward evening
the heron lifts his long wings
leisurely and rows forwardinto flight. He
has made his decision: the south
is swirling with clouds, but somewhere,
fibrous with leaves and swamplands,
is a cave he can hide in
and live.
“Blue Heron” can be read as a determination to gut through a depressed state. Even as the winter wind howls around her house and through her mind, she is strengthened by thinking of “a bird with an eye like a full moon/ deciding not to die, after all.” Here’s how she lives:
I sit out the long afternoons
drinking and talking;
I gather wood, kindling, paper; I make fire
after fire after fire.
McGrath, by contrast, doesn’t so much hunker down as embrace the season. “I am happy enough here,” he writes, “where Dakota drifts wild in the universe.” The dark prairie sends his imagination soaring.
