February: A Study in Morrison, Lorde & Plath

Midwinter reading is an immersion

Onchi Koshiro, Ravel-Alborada del Graciozo. Series: Five Abstract Musical Portraits, No. 3., 1933

The first sun in sixty days.

The faintest trace of peach in the sky.

I like how Patricia Fargnoli describes it in February Pre-Dawn: a “thin line of apricot sky in the west / beyond the crisscrossed / trunks of trees”.

From the poem February 29 by Jane Hirshfield:

Linda Pastan observes that in this abbreviated month snow melts midair to rain.

Every kind of weather. ¹

Midwinter – invincible, immaculate, says Angela Carter in The Snow Child, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.

February is a “month of despair / with a skewered heart in the centre”, Margaret Atwood writes in a poem titled simply February: “I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries / with a splash of vinegar".

Though not as pronounced as what occurs in June or September, this is the winter month where everything shifts. We are halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox; the darkest days are behind us, we’re leaning towards the light. There was a meme I saw recently that made me laugh—“The thing about January is that she’ll really make you feel all 31 of her days.” It felt physical, stepping into February.

I’m reminded too of something Nina MacLaughlin wrote in Winter Solstice as I note the time on the stove clock, the sun which reflects off a neighbour’s window and into my kitchen later in the day: “In time, the seconds accumulate the light accumulates, and some unexpected evening next month, you might look around and see a different quality of light at almost five. The same way you might, in the thick of July, notice your evening arriving a little earlier.”