How Poems Work – Chantel Lavoie on Eric Folsom’s “December Music”

December Music

A snow shower fell on a dark lake somewhere north of town,
The silent waves soaked up the flakes before anyone noticed.

The rhythm of our walk on the old rail bed, the structural steel of the verb;
We buttoned our coats against the gusts and gave each step a name.

Emotions rolled like katabatic wind, the luggage was stacked against us,
Outside of the empty station, the blowing snow of a licorice night.

We have listened, as advised, to the bitter angles of our nurture,
But this only created a timing device set for self-distraction.

In love poems, Christmas trees stand for trying to act mature,
But the sad truth is there will never be another kiss like yours.

The cultured library mouse will surely not object to the crumbs
The children watching a puppet show drop from their sandwiches.

Such a mild fate, sprezzatura of metamorphic animals and mountains,
With any luck the gates of hell will be closed by the time we get there.

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Before Anyone Noticed: Eric Folsom’s “December Music” in Lift Bridge: A Garland of Anti-Ghazals (Carleton Place, ON: catkin press, 2020).

Eric Folsom (named first poet laureate of Kingston in 2011) continues to write of that small city in his chapbook, Lift Bridge: a garland of anti-ghazals. “December Music” is the twelfth and last piece in the year-shaped collection. The poems together move with the act of walking, addressing what is observed and said while doing so. There is a love story running (or walking) through the series; but also stories about geography, the city, and emotions other than love.

Traditional ghazals deal with melancholy, longing, or questions about existence and the world; anti-ghazals do the same, while moving past traditional diction and the more limited imagery of the older form. Those in Folsom’s book are comprised of five to seven couplets, “December Music” having seven.

As ghazals do, the first couplet offers image and action complete unto themselves:

A snow shower fell on a dark lake somewhere north of town,
The silent waves soaked up the flakes before anyone noticed.

The transience of the moment, seemingly occurring at a distance from human eyes, is undercut, however, by the “rhythm of our walk on the old rail bed” that sets off the second couplet. There are eyes, there are feet, and there is a “We” who “buttoned up our coats against the gusts and gave each step a name.” Yes,  the steps of those walking, like the flakes on and immediately in the dark lake, are fleeting, yet in giving “each step a name” the speaker implies that someone does notice the flakes—quite simply because we know that this is the relationship between snow and waves, even if a particular moment goes unnoticed. Water changes form, then changes again in returning to itself. This occurs while “we”, moving horizontally in our quest for progress, work on “structural” projects—in steel or verbs.

“[K]atabatic wind” is wind that rolls down a slope due to gravity, and so the rolling “emotions” are rolling down. Folsom’s speaker is playing a melancholy game with the pathetic fallacy / anthropomorphism of each moment: saying these things are like us because we are like these things. A station appears in this third couplet and on the walk, to complement the “old rail bed” mentioned earlier; although “luggage” (that is, baggage) “stacked against us” emphasizes heaviness, and the difficulty of getting anywhere. Finishing this couplet, “the blowing snow of a licorice night” is powerful—white on black like the flakes on the waves with which we began—and bittersweet.

Having “listened. . . to the bitter angles of our nurture” rather than the better angels of our nature is a playful trope—another fun moment with words in the midst of inevitable pain. In taking note of “love poems,” the poem does and does not identify itself as such—contrasting, in a season loaded with symbols, whatever is “mature” with the simple, naïve statement that “there will never be another kiss like yours.” This is nostalgia in the making. The penultimate couplet then conjures countless words and their implied structural function—and fiction—with the puppet show in the library. The baser needs of the mouse for the sandwich crumbs from the show allude to (our) destruction linked to (our) performances.

The final couplet, juxtaposing “mild” with “fate”, doubles up on complementing the serious with the frivolous, while apparent ease is coupled with great effort in the term “sprezzatura”. The “metamorphic animals and mountains” remind us of the puppets in the previous couplet (the speaker using metamorphic both with respect to transformation and to geography). Finally, the startling last line is “With any luck the gates of hell will be closed by the time we get there.” Here, Folsom’s gift for pairing the epic with the mundane reveals the speaker and the beloved are still moving, going somewhere, but it’s not up to them how this thing will play out. Of all the lines in the poem, this is the one with the greatest number of single-syllable words (all but one, and that outlier has only two syllables). The simplicity of this final line, with “gates of hell” depending on “luck”, makes the lovers’ walk more a doomed pilgrimage than peregrination, alluding, perhaps, back to the beginning, where snowflakes are soaked up by silent waves in a dark lake.

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