The Snow Man

When I woke up, I hit the silence button on my wristwatch alarm, and quietly arose from bed into the pre-dawn night. My roommates were sleeping, and would be for a while after I left the house that morning. I shifted and slid through the darkness of unlit rooms, passing the man asleep on the couch only in his dreams. My bag had been packed the night before; I slipped it over my shoulder and walked outside into the frosty air.
Except it actually wasn't that cold.

And the goddamn sun was shining. 

Completely threw my groove.

My winter has finally given way to everyone else's lovely little spring. 

There's no excuse for how hot it can get outside starting now, and inevitably will for the next unbearably long time. Not a single ac had time to kick back into life during the one day we had to prepare for this weather, so the rank sweat of the collective masses lingered in the air all over my campus, in every room and every hall. To leave a building is to subject yourself to these ultraviolent heat rays, and the only solution is to squint and grimace (grin and bear) your way to shelter as quickly as you can.

I am melting, suffocating, and everyone around is dancing, laughing.  Nobody wants to wear pants.

So when Rudd decided this day of all days to read Stevens' poem, I felt the spirit and the chill, and took refuge in it. When he recited this last solace, there were tears on my face right there in his class. It's going to be a long summer, but I think I'll be alright.

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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-Wallace Stevens