SchizSnowPhrenia (Covid Cabin Fever)

Aiken, Not Heard: A Poetic Toast to Surviving 365 Days of PTSD

 “these gross intelligences, these humdrum minds so bound to the usual, the ordinary?

it said peace, said remoteness, said cold, it said sleep” …The psychosis of snow, the silence

The cadence of flakes, the whisper of glinted winds, the scrape of shovel blades, solitary;

it said cease, said inchoateness, said old, said deep. The thrombosis of woe, the violence

Soft chimes chide in the distance; icicles overrun gullies;

North Branch Reformed, the church that serves

Backing-up beeps from cowering plows

Parallax views of steeples shimmer deep in the periphery,

Dissociate, disintegrate, melt down from the mountaintops

And burble into rivulets and carve-out curves

Their ministries of synastries ricochet off windowpanes

Behind which lie deadened stares of Cruciferae

Hassle-man Paul, awaiting the mail haul, clean, layered, and white

Yet not in sight of the dirty, mundane world

Family estranged, vision deranged, engrossed in the trance

He looks far askance, listens for mail-truck rumble

The shrink is called in, he probes with chagrin, cajoles Paul: “Confess” …

Only to regress (irritant = pearl)

“I hate you … go away!” We hear poor Paul say, to his disconsolate Mom

For he’s too far gone, schizo-crumbled

In 1901, its second month done, his eye-surgeon Dad went stark raving mad

Murdered a minister’s daughter (his wife)

Then took his own life, while Conrad, 11, heard gunshots

And then was spirited away, yet never left

Lost splendor, Savannah, its counter-heavenly manna

Descending upon him in death; Wilmington River water

His tombstone a bench, its scenic bluff drenched in live oaks adorned with Spanish moss

Its presence, bereft

Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown, symbolic seeds sown

Gave his love to the world, martinis are twirled

As visitors sit and pardon the Good/Evil Garden, Give my love to the world, he implores

"Qui voit Ouessant boit son sang": Who sees Ushant sees his blood

To the world, give my love, as ships crash their hopes on its shores

Swirling cauldron of emotion, memory and motion, impressions just like stormy days

Where sunlight shines sparsely, revealing true nature harshly

Before cloudbanks and downpours hold sway

Observers obscured, overwhelmed and unheard, and art eyes itself in the mirror

Heroic and fictive, or doubtful, vindictive, its chaos is all one can hear

In its midst, resonation, a savage vibration establishing pattern and tone

The prospect, while distant, prompts meaning, insistent: that none of us venture alone

That which goes ahead, comes back changed or dead; the voyage the vessel of truth

The promise of landfall, the menace of sea thrall, claims souls on the shoals of one’s youth

A last resting place, that agonic space, ‘tween rebellion and piety, aground

The fears of the child, evermore reconciled, subdued to one’s purpose once found

Ocean power confused, wind power diffused, shifted swiftly to beauty and woe

“Separate we come, and separate we go, and this be it known, is all that we know”

Totality of response assured, universal harmony secured, the monomyth vision proceeds

And worship, the dream, for once, what it seems, is met by its symbolist needs

Ambivalences shimmer, ambiguities simmer, till visions emerge and emote

Incisions in psych, rescissions of spite, find footing in what Aiken wrote

“All lovely things will have an ending, all lovely things will fade and die,

and youth, that’s now so bravely spending, will beg a penny by and by.”

No T.S. Eliot, he (downstream causality), antidote to impalpable dream

Memories, dystopian, his mother’s mouth open, frozen in act of a scream

Umbilical severed, and possessed forever, his parents lay still on the floor

Creative resurgence, from familial emergence, betrayals conveyed their own doors

Separation, coalescence, and voyage concupiscence

("Sauve Qui Peut": every man for himself)

Interactions familial, connections umbilical, self-inflicted wounds blot out all else

Protected, self-sufficient, yet steadfastly deficient, stuck in dolce far niente denial

Amidst annihilation, regain one’s life station, one’s power to value by trial

Joy, community, connection dictate one’s direction amidst cosmic consciousness’ glare

And spiritual locus becomes one’s Life-focus, beyond comprehension to share

Furtive search, understanding, its custody remanding, to jail cells of family frame

At peace he reposes, poetic symbiosis, attesting to Dickinson’s name

His snow, silent, secret, emboldens his egress; his essence, while shaken, not stirred

A Bond hero’s journey, his heavenly tourney, commended by each Aiken word

So sip your martini, unbottle a genie, and gradually let distress unclench

His quest for salvation, and expatriation, forever entombed on his bench.

[video: https://archive.org/details/silent_snow_secret_snow]