Blizzard

In the poem “Keep Me,” from Henri Cole’s Blizzard, a discarded silk necktie pleads from a trashcan for the speaker to take it home. Tying it in a Windsor knot around his neck, the speaker hears the voices of dead friends and lovers, which multiply like a chorus of muses, until, all of a sudden, it is “the ’80s again, a darksome decade.” One man, Miguel, says: “Remember / death ends a life / not a relationship.” Grief is sudden and afterlives feel vivid, present, and conterminous with the land of the living. Neckties and kittens serve as portals to other time periods, and Cole is always careful to acknowledge who is “widowed” when someone departs. In “Corpse Pose,” Cole writes:

Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to die
is almost unbearable. This is where you live now,
I explain. Please stop crying.

The poem ends with a flashback to when the cat’s owner and Cole, in their youth, “tramped through woods of black oaks.” Time has an eccentric and deeply compelling flexibility in these poems, many of them sonnets, which explore how memory copes with and adapts to loss and change, but without a cavernous claustrophobia or sense of doom. Cole’s poems explore “end times” in all their teleological possibilities. Here, the speaker’s loneliness is refracted through rituals of food, the presence of animal life, and the specter of death. Cole’s insight is refreshingly indeterminate, with poems that never quite arrive at a particular argument nor splendor in didacticism. In the poem, “Pheasant,” about hunting, the speaker observes:

Now I eat what is caught with my own hands
like my father, and feel confused. The charm
flees. I want my life to be borrowing and
paying back. I don’t want to be a gun. 

There’s a childlike innocence to the confusion registered in this poem, as if Cole is hoping he can somehow avoid being the cause of another creature’s disappearance from the earth. Pleading and angelic, he wishes to reincarnate what is lost, to not be the gun.