Winter, in this poem, catches the flu. "winter takes a break everybody has the london flu / takes it easy so why not him": the season is a slacker with a cold, and the speaker's tone is just as offhand. The backyard becomes "an icebox turned on defrost," a domestic image that shrinks a whole season to a kitchen appliance leaking onto the floor. Everything "drips / melts runs," and the speaker's verdict, "how vulgar can you get," is half disgust and half grudging amusement. The thaw is not pretty. As the snow "dis- / appears," the "old garbage reappears." What looked pure was only a cover.
Then comes the pivot: "and i read." The next line is set off in quotation marks, "a nest is a bird's house," and it is almost comically plain. The speaker's reaction is a shrug: "i've known this for a long time people have told / me for a long time it is such an old story in / fact i hesitate to repeat it." The poem knows it is dealing in commonplaces and says so. The quotation marks suggest borrowed words, and the sentences that follow ("nests are places of intimacy designated by an attraction," "there does not exist an intimacy that is repellent") sound more like an essayist's propositions than the speaker's own chatter. The poem seems to be turning a book's voice into part of its own thinking. The tension is between the speaker's boredom with the old story and the way it keeps working on her anyway.
The final lines show how it works. "Memory is a wardrobe with the / presence of lavender the history of the seasons / enters." Against the garbage outside, the wardrobe is an ordered, scented interior, and it too holds seasons, just folded away. The icebox from the opening comes back in a new form. Memories, like food put in the freezer, are stored without knowing their use: "we shall see later we say to ourselves whether or not we'll use them." The outer thaw is matched by an inner one, and "memories come crowding" like the meltwater that "runs" through the yard. The last phrase is the cleverest. "To open them is to experience an event of whiteness." Snow has vanished from the yard, but whiteness returns as a mental event. The poem moves from the wet, dirty, outside world to a clean, quiet interior, and it does so in the same breath as its pronouns shift from private "i" to shared "we" and "us."
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the poem reads as a block of prose with no capital letters, not even for "i" or "london." Full stops fall mid-line ("our backyard is an / icebox turned on defrost. through all pores drips"), so the rhythm comes from sentence length: short, blunt statements in the opening, then longer, more abstract ones. The line breaks seem to follow the width of the page and not the breath, and they cut words open: "dis- / appears," "re- / call," "wheth- / er," "exper- / ience." The first of these enacts its meaning, since the word is literally disappearing at the margin. The last leaves "ience" hanging, as if the experience were something you have to cross a gap to reach.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses to be solemn about something solemn. It admits that the comfort of a nest, of home, of remembered things is an old story and a cliché, then shows it still comforts. The title looks like a date, perhaps a January in the Roman-numeral style, though that is only an inference from its form. If so, the poem catches a small, unglamorous moment, a thaw, a book, a tired mind, and makes it the place where memory opens.