Winter looks like an ending, and "Open Studio Poem #18" quietly argues otherwise. In nine short lines, Mary F. C. Pratt pictures the frozen February world as a workshop. Below the surface the earth is busy, above it the sky keeps rearranging itself, and the people indoors are making things too. The central idea is that seclusion is not emptiness. Dormant seasons, in the ground and in our lives, are when quiet making happens.
The poem is built from three sentences, and each moves to a new place. The first goes down: "Under snow, under solid ground, / earth knits a fabric of mycelium, / bulb, the roots of chrysanthemum / and rose." The repeated "under" works like a descent, and the hard consonants of "solid ground" make the soil feel thick and heavy. Then comes the verb "knits." Mycelium, the thread-like body of a fungus, really does form a web, so the metaphor is apt. It also turns the earth into a crafter with a quiet, patient, handmade kind of labour. The list that follows is slow and dense with commas, and it ends in two flowers named for their beauty. The line endings "mycelium" and "chrysanthemum" echo each other, a faint rhyme in a poem that otherwise has none, as if the two words were stitched together. The line break after "chrysanthemum" also lets "and rose" flicker for a moment as a verb, a small hint of things rising before the full stop shuts it down.
The second sentence lifts our eyes upward. "The February landscape / shapes a shifting collage / of branch and cloud, / a splash of jay-blue." The sibilance of "shapes a shifting" gives the line a soft, sliding sound, which suits clouds in motion. "Collage" shifts the metaphor from textile to visual art. It is a good choice, because a winter view really is cut-and-pasted from dark branches against flat white sky. The only colour in the poem is "jay-blue," and it arrives as a "splash," a painter's word. Placed after so much brown and white, it is as startling as the bird itself. (The line as supplied reads "a splash of of jay-blue." The doubled "of" looks like a slip, and I have read it as a single one.)
The final sentence brings in people: "We stay secluded, painting / our lives with aplomb." Now the poem's two halves meet. The earth knits and shapes, and we paint. The line breaks mid-thought on "painting," which makes it hang for a beat before its object arrives. The repeated "s" in "stay secluded" carries over the hush of the previous lines, but "aplomb" ends the poem with a firm, closed sound. The word means calm self-assurance, and it comes from a French phrase connected with the plumb line, the weight a builder drops to check that a wall stands straight. That is a neat accidental echo of the downward pull of the opening, though the poem never points it out.
The title adds a gentle irony. An "open studio" is usually when artists let visitors in, yet this poem is about being "secluded." The "#18" suggests this is one piece in a numbered sequence, though I can only infer that from the title. The poem doesn't say why "we" are staying in, and that restraint is part of its charm. Seclusion may be chosen or imposed, but either way the speaker treats it as a working condition rather than a loss.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. The lines vary in length and the sentences are allowed to run across them. The shape of the thought does the organising instead: down into the soil, up into the sky, then indoors to the human table. Each stage uses the vocabulary of art, which quietly puts the earth, the weather and the people in the same company of makers. The effect is calm rather than dramatic, and a bare February can come to feel like a studio in the middle of a project.