Contributor’s Marginalia: Diana Cao responding to Felicity Sheehy’s poem “February”

It’s May in Massachusetts, and spring is doing the most. Last night, I saw a baby rabbit—little nugget of a thing!—pause in the middle of the sidewalk before it hopped into some bushes. This morning, a teenage turkey sat in our front yard, cooling itself in the dirt (for those unfamiliar, wild turkeys roam the streets of Cambridge (see attached photo for proof)). Pollen dusts the cars parked on the side of the street. So, it’s a funny time to be revisiting Felicity Sheehy’s “February.”

But in a lot of ways it’s also the perfect time to return to the piece. The intensity of each season in New England sometimes makes me forget that other seasons ever existed, that there have been and will be other ways to live. Sheehy’s poem both captures that feeling about February—”At least it is short enough / to be endless”—and assures me that time has passed. Outside, the daffodils are wildly sprouting; no more of the slim-fisted ice of Sheehy’s February. No more sweaters and soot. At least for now.

Because this poem also assures us that time comes back around. February, with its post-holiday letdowns and discarded resolutions, will return—and with its return will come another short month of long nights to sit up with our thoughts: “Like me,” Sheehy’s “February” begins, “it is hard to love.”

A fantastic opening because it’s the truth. I don’t personally know anyone whose favorite month is February, and though I’m sure its fans exist, it’s not an obvious choice. February is neither a summer month of warm evenings and picnics, nor an early winter month of twinkle lights and still-clean snow. Not to mention the showy leaves and blossoms of fall and spring, the anticipation they bring. By February, the cold has stopped being festive.

But who among us doesn’t understand being hard to love? I’ve never felt such kinship with February as I do at the start of this poem.

And even while this poem describes February as hard to love—with its “midnight / at midday and moonlight / at dawn”—the music in the lines belies that unloveliness. This poem is a delight to read out loud. Consider:

It sits in thick crusts
on the sidewalk, licking
its boots. It slumps past
bridges, clicking its teeth,
slipping in slim-fisted ice.
Always it is cold in one way
or another.

The sound of February in these lines is hard—and also seductive. February, whether you like it or not, draws you in, forces you to participate bodily in its reality. That’s what the music does to me in this poem. By the time we get to “some snug by the harbor,” I’m inside the piece. Sweatered, sipping my amber drink, I might almost be lulled into some vision of coziness when the truth sneaks up again: “you remember / that your mother will die.” This is how nature is: always “cold in one way / or another.” Time passes. So do mothers. So do we.

We might dwell on that reality during February’s dark nights, and we might find relief when the spring comes offering new life—those baby rabbits! the budding branches outside my window! We might find comfort in the fact that there is an order to seasons, to cycles of life and death. But in the end this poem knows, also, that that order yields, ultimately, to something else. Chance, in this poem, is the higher power.

“God ends it / with a roll of the dice.” We’re just lucky to be here.