Mark Strand's "Lines for Winter"

Thoughts on love and winter.

Lines for Winter

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.


from Selected Poems  (Knopf, 1979)

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(As a new little thing, I thought I might occasionally record myself reading each week’s poem. I miss reading poems aloud. So here’s Mark Strand’s “Lines for Winter.”)

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It’s funny. As I sit down to write this tonight, the last class I taught — just a few hours ago — was my AP Literature class, where my students worked in groups to read and unpack and then present on an assortment of contemporary poems. One group read and discussed Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” which begins, perhaps quite famously, with these lines:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

These lines are lines I’ve thought about forever since I’ve read them, lines I’ve since committed to memory, as I imagine so many have. And I think about them now as I read Mark Strand’s admonition that you love what you are.

I think about them, too, because of both Oliver and Strand’s use of the second-person. Just look again at the first sentence of Strand’s poem, which spills and tumbles out over the course of almost ten lines:

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. 

What a gentle way to begin a poem. It may not seem so at first, with just those two words — Tell yourself — taking up an entire line, as they do each time they appear. Reading those words by themselves, I might be taken aback; I might wonder why Strand is forcing an action upon me, making me tell myself something without knowing what it will be. But as the sentence unfolds, it becomes a sentence of tenderness. Tell myself that I will go on. Tell myself that I will continue, even now, and even in winter.

In discussing Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” in class, one student remarked that the use of the second-person made the poem feel like it was written for her, that there was a real sense of intimacy she felt in reading it. And it’s true, right? It’s a beautiful sentiment — that a group of people in a room can read the same poem at the same time and each feel as if they are uniquely and compassionately invited to be its only listener.

And it’s funny, too, because one of the other poems I assigned today was Philip Levine’s “What Work Is,” which makes the somewhat drastic switch, as it begins, from first person plural to second person:

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.

I love this poem so much. It was one of my first favorite poems, and one that continues to reward careful attention. I turn to it again and again. And earlier today, while working with one group of students, we talked about that move from we to you, and how immediately it seems to implicate the reader. We talked about the brashness of Levine’s “Forget you” — the boldness of such a moment in a poem. It invites the reader in and then literally tells them to, well, fuck off. Unbelievable! And it’s in that moment that the you of the poem becomes less about the reader and more about the speaker. He’s saying you, but really he’s talking about himself. That’s him standing in the rain, shifting from one foot to another. That’s him thinking he sees his brother. That’s him not seeing his brother. That’s his sorrow, his regret, and his love — all bound up in the you. He’s writing to you and himself, both at once.

And so I guess I’m thinking a lot about the second person tonight. It’s present in today’s poem and in Oliver’s poem and even — at times — in Levine’s poem as a form of intimacy, a way of making a poem feel so deeply personal for the person who is reading it. When Strand writes Tell yourself, then, yes, I begin to tell myself. I tell myself that I will keep walking. And when Oliver writes You do not have to be good, then, yes, I feel somewhat forgiven. I feel her hand reaching through the page and beyond it, into the air between the page and my body, and then I feel the hand bridging that gap and touching me on the shoulder — something gentle, to let me know it is okay.

But I think what I often forget about this intimacy of the second person is that it is a written thing, a made thing. I forget that Mark Strand had to sit down and — as a person, as someone held in the act of writing — had to alter the first person perspective of his life and shape it into the second person. It makes me think of a moment in Kiese Laymon’s essay “You Are the Second Person”:

After writing for about two hours, you wonder why you start the piece with “Alone, you… ” You are the “I” to no one in the world, not even yourself.

You’ve eviscerated people who loved you when they made you the second person in their lives, when they put the relationship’s needs ahead of your wants. And you’ve been eviscerated for the same thing.

That moment when Laymon writes You are the “I” to no one in the world, not even yourself is such a tragic, harrowing, sorrowful moment. It’s a moment of depersonalization and shame, perhaps. A moment of loss — of the self, of identify, of so much. And maybe that’s, in part, why and when we write — when even the self feels lost, and the act of language-twirling-and-making-and-shaping turns us again and again, like soil plowed, back towards ourselves. It reminds us that we live, that we are full of what living is.

And maybe, too, this is why I am drawn to the second person. When I read a poem in the second person, when I read Strand writing tell yourself…that you love what you are or when I read Oliver writing you do not have to walk on your knees, I not only feel the sense of unburdening that comes when I think of the words as something directed at me and offered to me in a form of compassion, but I also feel a wellspring of kindness toward the writers themselves, because I think that they must also be writing for themselves. In other words, I think we sometimes turn to the second person when we feel lost to ourselves, when we need to be reminded of our ability to be compassionate to others so that we can, in turn, be compassionate toward ourselves. Maybe, as writers, we turn to the second person from a place of loneliness — a place where we feel that no one will speak to us or forgive us or hold us, so we use the word you and then read the poem back to ourselves. Maybe then we feel less alone. It’s like reaching out your arms and then curling them around your own shoulders.

And now, as I am writing and finishing this little essay on Saturday morning, it’s snowing in New York City. Just a little bit. I’ve seen a few flakes dance and sway in the winter breeze outside my window, where the tree that stretches up to the fifth floor of the building outside has shed its leaves that once were cut through with orange and yellow and once, even longer ago, were full and lush and green. The snow is a welcome thing. I will go for a walk later and watch those few flakes land on the fruit packed in boxes outside the stores — these graceful specks of brilliant white atop the brilliant and shimmering oranges and tomatoes and lemons, cold and ripe and beautiful.

As Larry Levis writes in my favorite snow-poem of all time:

Snow could say that, & almost perfectly.

And though that first feeling of snow is beautiful, I also know that we are in the midst of winter, long and cold and dark as it is. I know that the sun will set before five pm tonight, and that, for all of February, it will still set before six. I know that most days this time of year, I feel the sun briefly on my walk from the train to my school, and then sometimes see it from a classroom window, and then leave my school just as the light has finally faded. For much of this week, these lines from Strand’s poem today have served as a kind of refrain for that walk from my school back to the train:

Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going.

There is something about winter that reminds me of my fragility, my limitation. Ever since my surgery over a year ago, I feel winter in my right knee. I feel the ache of it, the cold kiss of a harsh breeze. This ache is the tune my body plays as it keeps going. This cold, this darkness — it does nothing but remind me to look inward, to tuck my head into my chest and breathe the warm air of my body back towards my body. Sometimes it exhilarates me. Sometimes it terrifies me. Often, I am tired — as I imagine you are. As you most certainly are. There is a moment in Harry Crews’s novel, The Gospel Singer, where one character says: “I was so sad I forgot how to cry.” That can be winter for you. So cold you forget how to shiver. So tired you forget how to sleep. So deprived of light that you forget how to burn.

So what then? Strand has one final thing for us to tell ourselves:

tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

If I have learned anything in my years of reading poems, it has something to do with love. I think, when winter whittles so much of ourselves away, and we are left, simply, with the self we hang onto when we are just trying to scrape by, the bare self burdened by so much and yet still bare — I think, when this happens, we become what we repeat. The coffee made while still half asleep in the silent dark. The tiptoed steps on the cold floor. The pants put on from the pile where we left them. The same walk each morning to the same place. The same walk each evening from the same place. And so, when I read Strand’s poem today, and when I think again of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” I am reminded that what I tell myself and allow myself and offer myself can also be a form of repetition. That I can say, looking in the mirror at my body in the dim morning light, that I love what I am. That I love this fragile thing, this skin peeling away, this half-opened eye, this knee that aches, this desperate wondering about this life each day, and how it has become what it is, and what it might become — if it becomes, or when it becomes, what it will be.

I used to think that — if you really loved someone or something — you shouldn’t have to tell what or who you loved that you loved them. And, too, that you shouldn’t have to remind yourself. I was wrong, I think. Well, I know. Winter reminds me of how easily I can burrow into myself, how easily I can feel the bite of wind and still forget the world. I don’t want to be the speaker in Levine’s poem, the one who asks:

How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? 

No. In this winter, this long and cold and often silent-save-for-the-whistle-of wind season, I want to tell myself that I love what I am, to be soft in the midst of harsh weather, to repeat that word — love — again and again for all that I love. The hand held under the bar. The wide eyes peeking out beneath the knit cap. The tree, poor guy, who lost his leaves. The campfire of stars. And the light, when I see it, made sharp and blue-bright by the cold, the bold shadows against the brick, the glistening and shimmering of snow as it freezes and also just before it melts. Yes. I love it all. I should say it more often.

Larry Levis ends his poem “Winter Stars” with these lines:

Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.

My love for these lines has grown ever since I first read them. And when I read them now, I think that Levis is saying that sometimes it is cold enough to not just long for warmth, but to offer it. And I love that. I love that because it is true. We are in it now. Winter. It is long and it is dark and it is cold. It is struck through sometimes with beauty. It shimmers and it freezes. As you repeat your daily life, as you wonder and sometimes ache and sometimes cry and sometimes even dream, tell yourself that you love what you are. Remember that it is cold enough to be warm.

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