ENVIRONMENTAL Poem: Greenland (or The Art of Winter), by Lee Chottiner

New Ice Core Analysis Shows Sharp Greenland Warming Spike
an AP headline

I have never seen Greenland
but I know it is a canvas that
painters color white; it is where

poets get lost in its blank
blizzards of words, peering
through the whiteouts,

hoping that there at least
winter will always stay old and bold and cold.

But no, they must write and paint its freezing truths
before the art of winter wanes

•

I was an artist in winter,
painting landscapes in drifts
with an icicle, sonnets of snow

foxtrotting with snowmen,
going downhill fast without
a tank of gas (a sled did just as well).

Once my wife and daughter sledded
down a West Virginia hill,
our basset hound bounding behind,

legs too short to keep up, the excited
canine dragged his private parts
through the fresh and friendly drifts.

This is winter art – galleried and
archived – until lost to the
book-burning winters of now.

•

Winter is also literature, it is
Tolstoy putting the final period to
War and Peace, for winter is war and peace,

waves of wintry wind
sweeping across the land
as it sleeps … in peace.

These classics we no longer read,
preferring the TikTok winters of chaotic
climates, which wouldn’t be so bad

but for all that lost knowledge, the library
of wintry books sitting darkened in the
sun, its doors locked, librarians laid off;

no one reads anyway.
Greenland was such a library
or maybe a monastery

where Inuit monks dipped their quills
and penned the classics of winter
before a dinner of whale blubber.

Greenland was cold for us all,
literate for the illiterate
Even if I close my eyes imagine

my boyhood winters of ’77 and ’78
I rarely state the truth: that Greenland paintings and books are through.