Polar Vortex
That’s when we hear the names of places
never mentioned on the 10 O’clock News:
Tower, Embarrass, Warroad, and Baudette.
Suddenly they are legendary; one after
another they report their astonishing
numbers: -45, -56, -60! How low can
they go? It’s a Polar Vortex! Happens
every twenty or thirty years up here in
the North, and for a few days, it’s all
we talk about. Where were we the last time
the temperature dropped to a gazillion below
zero? Will the Governor close down
the whole state? Will the car start?
Next day, when we hear the schools
and airports are closed, we start to relax.
Nothing is going to happen for a while,
and there’s nothing we love more than that.
*
On Wednesday
When we woke, we heard
the sound of rain—constant rain—
a whisper along the edges of
the roof, a steady threading
through in the air.
We leaned on pillows
and remembered
the night before the night before.
We planned (even though we knew
such things must come as naturally
as leaves to a tree). Then you got
the pangram in one, and the wordle
in two. You beat the bot, but
when the skies cleared, it was just
another day, filled with worries,
little gray donkeys packed and
ready, carrying enough supplies
to last us into winter and beyond.
*
Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. Her first book of poetry, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women’s Poets Prize Press,1995). Her second book of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Her recent books are Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), This Long Winter (Carnegie Mellon Press 2021), and That Other Life (2023). She served as the Minnesota Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2021, succeeding Robert Bly, and she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.
