I hate Valentines. I hate February. I hate chocolates. Most of all, most of all I hate long winters without snow.
Here I sit with a second bad cold in the past 2 weeks which I don't cure because I still work from home instead of curling up under warm sheets with a cup of warm tea. .I realize that the world won’t fall apart if I just let go, but I will fall apart if I let the winter blues take over.
And the world is falling apart. It has been such a long winter without snow... Kapuscinski books no longer keep me warm with their descriptions of African sun, samba from Rio no longer soothes my saudade filled soul.
What has happened to the snow? I spend December in rain covered Portugal, Warsaw without the hazy shades of dreamy white powder, no frost cracking under my feet... And Rome with its moonsoon rains making me catch terrible colds on my scooter. Yes, I laughed and smiled and danced when I saw snow for the very first time this winter. I woke up last Thursday morning in the silence of the beautiful B&B owned by a sweet Belgian artist - it felt as if I woke up inside his painting. Standing watching the snow fall on Brussels through wide, huge windows. How ironic, the Polish girl goes to Brussels to see the very first snow this winter. By the evening the snow has melted, but at least I still had the rare luxury of taking a soothing bath inside the painting.
It has been a first time in two years that I haven't gone to Sri Lanka or Brazil to break the long, winter blues working under the steaming sun. I cherished being still, but not in the winter where moonsoon like rains have replaced the little beauty that winters bring... And I never really loved winters – climate being the most often cited reason for the “what are you doing in Rome?”
And what has happened with the time when I used the long winter nights to write? In which translation have I lost myself?
This, I think, is the only good poem I wrote...May it remind me that snowless Roman days used to make me write. May it remind me that even in Rome there used to be beautiful frost in the mornings... May it remind me that my heart has healed.
Roman Frost
24-01-2004
Misty moist frost breaking the structure of my bones
As morning sun fills spaces between antique ruins of human desire
I listen to gypsies sing the same Russian song
On the tram stuck in the raining confusion of Rome
Late to work late to work late to work
Late to begin anew because I belong
I belong to my memories of la dolce vita summers
I belong to the chaos eternal of inevitable traffic jams
Wind from the Castelli mountains carries
Answers to the riddles of forgotten witches and gods
Answers rise like bubbles to some vast horizontal plane
Where oxygen changes form.
Across the table I warm myself
At his eyes’ transparent fire
How grizzled his eyebrows are
Underlining the black quick lines of no repeated
This is what love means: returning where you can breathe.
I refused at my return from deserts’ vast spaces
At my return from white silence of snow covered birthplace
The difficulty presented by any instance of contact
Homecoming month later breaking the surface:
Inhaling - shaking my head in wonder.
Because days now I knew
I must give up wanting him
Resolved not to offer more unguarded smiles
On the terrace I moved upwind from his cigarette
To move away from his intense eyes and break with discontinuity.
His affection is huge violating a fixed boundary
Violating the resolve of his own contradictions
Violating the safety stones he drops with each sentence
Keeping it all in the realm of inevitable erotic clash.
And I leaned into his touch as if it were home
To end it speaking about unfeasibility
Months and days it seemed of making love later
As moist cold Roman winter pierced me with pain.
As frost sets on dead trenches of elegant Cyprus trees
I belong to the stones that witnessed my bliss and ache
The mouth of truth where I held my hands in marriage lies
The frozen water in the fountain where I worshiped my youth.
