Billy Clem
On the Coldest Night of the Year
The weatherman is right, for once, and outside tonight
the wind chill has reached –40. Those who cannot bear
the drumming of diurnal nightmares search for grates
or door jams. Some submit themselves to shelters,
finally. Not you. You have long, invisible tubes
to blow warmth around your blanketed body and
your room crowded not with others’ needs and
their torn clothes, parched throats, and scabs,
but with gadgets sparking mini dots green, blue,
or yellow to convenience your earned rest
into a private borealis, a show that manages your sweat
so that you can carry on a piracy of originality.
The labor of dreaming, watching, laughing, lying,
eating, fucking, wasting, fiddling continues
without your conscious wiring at work. But
your body can shift from snoring to drowsy
to awake enough for you to understand the world
you thought yours, open and ordered as an old library,
letters and words and images stacked in place,
a whole climate conducted, controlled, and exact,
just refills a container sealed and sold with some
preservatives of willing bliss and no expiration.
And spirit, if you can climb through this wreckage
cutting your hands and shins to find it, mangled, opaque,
perhaps familiar, might be possible to reclaim. You
may remember trees, their songs and breath, wind
to your ears, a music once whispering your name,
cleaning and suturing the wounds and scrapes
of a time and place uncharted in the chronicles
of ease and confidence. Enter the raw and brutal,
the silent roar, the freezing heat to which no mercury
can rise. Find yourself hypothermic, barely pulsing,
just breathing. Gather the stinking scraps that lie
at your feet and prepare to resew by hand and
candlelight, if all the bees haven’t been depleted,
the seams and hems of your old self, your Sunday best.
Billy Clem‘s work has appeared in Great River Review, Vox Populi, The New Verse News, Counterexample Poetics, Moon City Review, and Elder Mountain. He teaches Composition, Multicultural Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies outside Chicago.
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