Winter Heat

by Sierra Golden

Months after the neighbors piled their firewood
tall as the windows, wide as the house, and strung
brown plastic between the pine trees, protecting
their winter heat and blocking my view,

it snows, and in the morning, the tarp-tented
heaps of uncut logs appear suddenly beautiful.
Just a fine shake of flakes shining in the sun,
tree-drips pattering on plastic, and I am in love

for a moment, thinking, Is this how a poem happens?
One day I sit in bed past any reasonable hour,
and finally stop thinking about the neighbors
stealing my view, about everything needing doing

or undoing: the dishes, my taxes, the mess I made
with my exes. Seeing the sap-leaking stacks of wood
as if for the first time, some part of me collapses—
maybe my work ethic? Personal aesthetics?

Moral standards? Whatever it was, wherever it stood
inside me opens, letting in what little light there is.

From The Slow Art. Bear Star Press, 2018.

Read this and other poems by Sierra Golden in The Slow Art, available for purchase online.

Ialways try to be on the lookout for moments of sudden attention in my life, like the one Sierra Golden describes so vividly in “Winter Heat.” Like her, I believe this is how a poem happens: some sound or image observed in stillness shifts something inside us, and we do our best to find the language to capture that unexpected change in perception. Any piece of writing, though, is simply a snapshot of our minds, hearts and environment in any given instant, and the source of that glimpse is perhaps better left unexamined, kept in the realm of the mystery. In this case, the speaker faces a more literal loss of perspective, the neighbors having “blocked her view” with their tarp-strewn piles of firewood. But one winter day, she is finally able to see the beauty in the snow-dusted scene (“I am in love/for a moment”) without any of her old story lines or preferences laid over what is right before her. She is at last able to stop focusing on “everything that needs doing/or undoing,” and allow herself to slip into what Virginia Woolf once called simply “a moment of being.” Golden is a master at capturing instances of deep attention, and in language as lush and physical as the natural world she brings to life so well in her work. This poem shows us that, no matter the view, no matter the list of tasks that threaten to steal our mind space, we can make peace with exactly where we are, sitting “in bed past any reasonable hour,” and finally letting go of the so-called logic that can easily disrupt our necessary inner lives.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Discuss a time when your own perspective suddenly shifted, and you felt an opening inside. What allowed the change to take place, and what did that “moment of being” feel like for you?

Photo by Shelley Goldstein

ABOUT THE POET: Sierra Golden

Sierra Golden graduated with an MFA from North Carolina State University. She won of the 2018 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, and her debut collection The Slow Art was published by Bear Star Press. The Slow Art was also a finalist for the 2019 Washington State Book Award. Sierra lives in rural Washington State.

POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.

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