My Life is a Guest House

A News Response Poem

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My life is a guest house.
Here is the kitchen:
small, warm, sparsely furnished, 
enough for a visitor to feel welcome,
smelling of coffee and toast.

Come down the hallway.
Here is a sitting room
with a hearth and a rocking chair,
a book splayed open on a side table
and a short lamp that throws off dim light.

Here is a porch, 
good for all seasons
with wicker and windows and screens
and a hanging bench.
In summer, air comes in 
on a cooling breeze,
fresh and crisp. 

Here are stairs that lead down
to a basement, unfinished.
Drywall and cement floors,
pipes exposed with boxes
littering the floor, cobwebs 
and dust, a damp, musty odor,
shadows at every turn,
steep steps iIlluminated 
by only the faintest ray of light.

On cold days, 
when the world is frigid,
caught in a vortex that seems endless, 
when my bones are numb
and breath frozen 
into a tiny cloud, just vapor 
here and gone,
this is where I can be found,
a guest underground, 
surrounded by darkness, 
the smell of clay.

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Author’s Note: The news response here is that yet another polar vortex is forecasted to blanket most of the continental United States in the coming week. These extreme temperatures come on the heels of other winter storms that left heavy snow and ice across the country.

The term “polar vortex” is believed to have been first used in the mid-19th century and described the atmospheric phenomenon of a swirling pattern of air around the poles. However, that phrase only became widely used by media in the winter of 2013-14, according to the AGU (Journal of Geophysical Research published on behalf of the American Geophysical Union). It was in 2013, when I lived in the Twin Cities, that I remember hearing the phrase polar vortex during a period where the temperatures were as low as -50 degrees. But before that, when I was growing up in Iowa, I believe we just called it “January.”

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