Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

A good snowstorm hushes the land. A good snowstorm mutes the noise of people, cars, and even airplanes. A good snowstorm makes room for birdsong and the noises of forest creatures in Vermont. Here in Nashville, lack of road salt and snowplows all but shuts the city down. The only sound is big flakes falling, an accumulation of silence. I love how nature disrupts the important goings-on of humans, how it forces us to grind to a halt and makes us one with our environs. We are smart to heed its signs.

Today’s poem builds from biblical and folk beliefs that weather is another way of receiving divine messages, an understanding closer to the mysteries and laws of nature.

If we had known,
by Marissa Davis

someone would have said to buy kerosene.
someone would have said: fell the trees, if only the ancients, or

the birds, they have gone oddly still, hardly breathing 
in those branches clean as the bones on a glutton’s plate

or asked, what on earth do the bats want, crying like that, and why
is every small life fleeing.

mother, knowing such long stillness is a kind of vertigo,
would have made us all pray our travelers’ mercies

& father, raised by women, would have spared
the hillside’s elder crabapple, guessed we wouldn’t perish for it.

if we in the town had been called out our doors by some autumn prophet,
she would have warned us—

come year’s break, watch for crystal. watch for stars to spatter in the distance, 
for sky to recover such immaculate black

it will make you clean as birth:
the stars which would not be stars, but transformers bursting—

brief contagion of fireworks blueing the low horizon,
flashing down to barrenness. the barrenness: what remained. like a pharoah

somewhere had talked his way into a grave mistake: first beauty, fugitive, then the pines
falling everywhere, everywhere,

common as the skins of a future summer’s cicadas, common as the mysteries
that claw out of clouds’ bellies like another world’s spawn.

& that gleam, that weight, implausible. the sycamores opaled & shimmered &
cracked & plunged & the oak branches swayed & stung the power lines

& the maples, ice-mauled, threw fatal shapes on the country roads, islanded Benton from Reidland, 
Paducah from Possum Trot, Lone Oak from atomic Ballard, every family from every other family,

forcing us close to our visible breath, to dark & water—something like a womb
but treacherous; less transparent than the beast of summer,

which we did know, every year, would have us, in yellow mania, vaulting drought & flood.
but in this—our tender southern winter—we had believed

home something more solid than a warbler’s nest.
harder fight for clouds’ whim. some days one knows while living them

were already written in apocryphal gospels. so close to diamond, that judgment 
warping over the branches of the birch trees, of magnolia

restless for martyrdom. metamorphosis of world into glass,
& our reflections grew dense & lucid in us; glass into vengeance,

& we noted, then, the purpose, a first expression
of something unnamable—unnamable, but solid, yes, so tangible

it could crack us all like a twig in its hand.

"If we had known," by Marissa Davis from END OF EMPIRE © 2025 Marissa Davis. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.