Twenty Two Words for Snow - Helen Mort

The lawn was freezing over

but the air stayed empty,

and I wondered how the Inuit 

would name this waiting - 

our radio playing to itself in the bathroom,

the sound from the street 

of ice-cream vans out of season

in this town where we don’t have 

twenty-two words for anything,

where I learned the name 

for artifical hills, the bridge

where a man was felled by bricks

in the strike. From the window,

I watch the sky as it starts to fill.

In the kitchen, dad sifts flour, 

still panning for something.

(Read the poem with its accompanying neuroscience on Helen's blog.) 

Chances are the reason you’re here at all is because the same thing has happened to you. And maybe you’re a bit sore about it. Maybe a bit bemused like; you’re trying to figure out how it happened. I mean, considering how good your defences were. You might even have tried the same thing: getting stern with it, putting on your best German and holding open the door for it. But all it did was get big-eyed and wouldn’t budge. And you melted. You melted. 

Like you I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for, when on the 24^th of April, at Deddington Lane I first read Helen Mort’s ‘Twenty Two Words for Snow’. Skinny thing, I thought. Slight, I thought. Bit of a stray. What I hadn’t thought was that it might have been too late already. That the mangy thing had come in through the back door and was - as I pontificated - already making itself comfortable on the hearth-rug. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It happens to the best of us. Feeling. And now it’s here we might as well help it settle in. Somehow I think this might be a long-term thing. 

But your inspections of the new resident during long nights by the fire make you non-the-wiser. At 94 words and just 10 seconds short of a minute it could be a short, stripped Meredithian sonnet or a whippet. With no full-rhymes and its diction only lifting out of the familiar once with, ‘Inuit’ it’s quiet. How then, since this list seems - if anything - exceptionally dull and uninformative, has it bitten you? 

Well, you can’t help but remember a phrase from the American poet Timothy Donnelly’s recent interview, where he mentions how he likes the way Wallace Stevens’ ‘thoughts fall.’ Trouble is it sounds so beautiful that you don’t think about it much at all. Just do what it wants you to: ‘Thoughts fall. Thoughts fall. The way the thoughts fall. The way the thought falls.’ And now the word ‘fall’ is suspended and as it sinks into print, you savour it. And suddenly what seemed merely well written is now perfectly unparaphrasable

How you’re led by the nose by the past-simple continuous, ‘The lawn was freezing over …’ on by the inoffensive conjunctions ‘but,’ ‘and,’ to the quiet expansion of the clump of independent clauses that follow, ‘ … our radio playing,’ ‘… the sound from the street.’ 5 to 13 are a not uncommon vision, one of those landscapes you come on in the car; everything suddenly big and far, very far away and the best thing about it? That it came upon you silently. Which is a really imprecise way of saying: I like how the thought falls. How it’s bloody ingenious because I feel like I understand it but can’t say how without sounding like an idiot. It’s snow. It - sounds? - sounds like falling snow. How?! 

The first sentence closes on the word ‘strike,’ which is a word that threatens to go supermassive black hole on all of us; to swallow the poem up whole. It doesn’t though. Maybe because of the music. Take the lines that follow for instance, 13 and 14. ‘From the window, / I watch the sky as it starts to fill.’ Can you hear it? What is that? ‘From the window, / I watch the sky as it starts to fill.’ But look, it happened before, take lines 5 − 9, is it just me or do ‘bathroom,’ ‘season’ and ‘anything’ make the same pleasant sort of consonantal hum? ‘Our radio playing to itself in the bathroom, / the sound from the street / of ice-cream vans out of season / in this town where we don’t have // twenty-two words for anything.’ What is it about this that makes it sound so beautiful? 

And then - some how - it has you feeling sorry. Sorry for it. Sorry for yourself too. As if there were good reason to. And even though you’re a little shocked to discover that dad was in the kitchen sifting out his flour; that your family alone must be stuck in a weird time-loop, fallen completely off the WI’s radar. But you don’t feel like making half-hearted crap jokes at the end of this poem. Because it’s got to you. It got to you with that gap you didn’t mind between 8 and 9, ‘this town where we don’t have // twenty two words for anything.’ 

Oh yes. This poem wants to be kept. Remember Ian McMillan’s anecdote? That the difference between going into a barbers in South Yorkshire and the South is 40 or so words? We’re not what you’d call loqacious. But then - maybe - that’s why we want to try for fluency so often. Our accustomed extremes of expression being: I’m just saying like or I’m saying nowt. Well I’m just saying like. I for one hope this poem has pups.

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Helen Mort performed ‘Twenty Two Words for Snow’ on the 24^th of April at the Guitar Bar's open mic slot in based in Hotel Deux Nottingham. Where were you? Helen Mort's performing at Bridlington Poetry festival on the 15th of June, don't miss it!  

(Poem reproduced with permission of the poet.)